From: arne@vajhoej.dk

On 8/29/2025 5:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <108t0d4$249vm$11@dont-email.me>,
> Arne Vajhøj   wrote:
>> On 8/29/2025 9:17 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> In article <108g8kk$33isk$1@dont-email.me>,
>>> Arne Vajhøj   wrote:
>>>> On 8/24/2025 7:27 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>>> In article <108dlq4$2fi6h$4@dont-email.me>,
>>>>> Arne Vajhøj   wrote:
>>>>>> On 8/19/2025 1:26 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>>>>> In article <10823ei$3pb8v$3@dont-email.me>,
>>>>>>> Arne Vajhøj   wrote:
>>>>>>>> Whether we follow tradition and call them integer and cardinal
>>>>>>>> or more modern style and call them int and uint is less important.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I would argue that, at this point, there's little need for a
>>>>>>> generic "int" type anymore, and that types representing integers
>>>>>>> as understood by the machine should explicitly include both
>>>>>>> signedness and width.  An exception may be something like,
>>>>>>> `size_t`, which is platform-dependent, but when transferred
>>>>>>> externally should be given an explicit size.  A lot of the
>>>>>>> guesswork and folklore that goes into understanding the
>>>>>>> semantics of those things just disappears when you're explicit.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The integer types should have well defined width.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And they could also be called int32 and uint32.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That seems to be in fashion in low level languages
>>>>>> competing with C.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Many higher level languages just define that int is 32 bit,
>>>>>> but don't show it in the name.
>>>>>
>>>>> If by "many higher level languages" you mean languages in the
>>>>> JVM and CLR ecosystem, then sure, I guess so.  But it's not
>>>>> universal, and I don't see how it's an improvement.
>>>>
>>>> That are two huge group of languages with a pretty big
>>>> market share in business applications.
>>>
>>> Market share is not the same as influence, and while the JVM/CLR
>>> languages _do_ have a lot of users, that does not imply that all
>>> are good languages.  In fact, only a handful of languages in
>>> each family have any significant adoption, and I don't think PL
>>> designers are mining them for much inspiration these days.
>>>
>>> Again, not universal, nor really an improvement over just using
>>> explicitly sized types.
>>
>> It is a huge domain that are totally dominated by two approaches:
>> [snip]
>
> So?  You referred to "many higher level languages".  That is
> qualitatively different than "a small number of languages with a
> huge share of the market."

Yes - that is two different statements.

But they are both true.

And the second qualifies the first in the sense that the
many are actually some that matter not pure exotic.

Arne

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