Hi Bob! :-)

 BS> I must register an exception here. One of the principle uses of C in 
 BS> modern programming is in embedded systems and DSP. In embedded 
 BS> systems especially, you might not have a whole lot of choice.
Yeah, I was forgetting about embedded environments.

[...]
 BS> In the future, we may move to custom hybrid 16- or 32-bit memory 
 BS> devices, but for now, the ability to use chars is very important for 
 BS> us.
I was oversimplifying, anyway. Accessing at byte granularity is not a
problem on x86 hardware, but using 16 bit is, at least on 32 bit operating
systems. Using 16 bit register then means having a use an operation prefix
and that means code size increase and on some CPUs even a 1 cycle penalty
at execution time.

Ciao
Pascal

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