Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote in a message to Dane Walther:

 JdBP>   Many of them are legacies of the hordes of Pascal
 JdBP> programmers that   infested Microsoft in the middle 1980s. 
 JdBP> They didn't really know how to   write C, so they did daft
 JdBP> things like

 JdBP>     typedef long LONG ;

On general principles, it made sense to add a layer of indirection to type
specifications.  This is especially important with language extensions such
as "FAR" or "NEAR", but it was probably reasonable to
make all types indirect for the sake of consistency.  Otherwise,
programmers would have to be bothered to remember that they should use
"FAR" instead of "far", but not "LONG"
instead of "long".  I think we would also agree that certain
aliases, such as "BYTE" and "WORD", tended to enhance
the clarity of code.
 
-- Mike


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