DConf 2013 Day 2 Talk 6: Higgs, an experimental JIT compiler written in D by Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

[Peter Williams]

On 09/06/13 14:03, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> If I had been designing the language, I might have gone for int8, uint8,
> int16, uint16, etc. (in which case, _all_ of them would have had sizes with no
> aliases without - it seems overkill to me to have both), but I also don't
> think that it's a big deal for them to not have the numbers either, and I
> don't understand why anyone would think that it's all that hard to learn and
> remember what the various sizes are

It's the ghost of problems past when the sizes many of the various 
integer/natural types in C were "implementation dependent".  Maybe it 
only afflicts programmers over a certain age :-)

Platform dependent macros such as int32 mapping to the appropriate type 
for the implementation were a mechanism for making code portable and old 
habits die hard.

Peter
PS the numbered int/uint versions would allow "short" and "long" to be 
removed from the set of keywords (eventually).
PPS I think the numbering paradigm would be good for floating point 
types as well.  The mathematician in me is unsettled by a digital type 
called "real" as real numbers can't be represented in digital form - 
only approximated. So, if it wasn't already too late, I'd go for 
float32, float64 and float80.