Hi Bob! :-)

 BS> I have, OTOH, heard of a couple of architectures where you 
 BS> couldn't necessarily count on shorts being 16 bits or longs being 32 
 BS> bits. Ints, of course, are all over the map. Fortunately, the days of 
 BS> those architectures are, like the days of one's complement math, 
 BS> mostly history.
Ahem, gcc on 64 bit machines uses a model where longs are 64 bits (LP64,
longs and pointers are 64 bit, int is 32 bit). On 32 bit machines, it uses
the ILP32 model; meaning int, long, and pointers are 32 bits.

Or did you mean a long could be less than 32 bits on some old oddball machine?

 BS> Excellent point - but, as you point out, not explicitly stated nor 
 BS> immediately obvious.
Even if a char were represented as, say, 64 bits, the actual value could
always be 255 or less, with EOF being represented by a value greater than
255.

Ciao
Pascal

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.1