Re: Bytes and Unicode

From: Torsten Mohrin (mohrin@sharmahd.com)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2000 - 16:17:26 EDT


"john" <john@nisus.com> wrote:

>I much prefer the convention of
>SInt8, SInt16, SInt32, SInt64, SInt128...
>UInt8, UInt16, UInt32, UInt64, UInt128...
>SChar8, SChar16, SChar32...
>UChar8, UChar16, UChar32...
>so that whether the thing is signed or unsigned is explicit and
>tightly bound, as it were.

Whether they are named "SInt8", "S_INT_8", "sint8_t" depends on
personal taste, coding style and conventions. ISO C provides
"uintXX_t" for unsigned integers. I agree that it would be better also
to denote the signedness explicitly. But I have to deal with it.
Redefining (renaming) all identifiers that do not conform to my taste
is a fight I can't win.

These data types unambigously define the size of the integer in bits.
But for data interchange between different systems the byte order is
also an issue. So "int16_t" should have two variants "int16be_t" and
"int16le_t" and maybe "int16_t" is only the default of the actual
processor architecture. That would require special compiler support.

Does Java specify the byte order of the primitive data types? I don't
know. But I would guess no, for performance reasons.

--Torsten



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