toString vs. toUtf8

Jason House jason.james.house at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 19:55:52 PST 2007


Robert DaSilva wrote:

> Jason House wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>> 
>>> Gregor Richards wrote:
>>>> Would you prefer if int => int32, long =>
>>>> int64, short => int16, byte => int8, real => float80 (portability be
>>>> damned), double => float64, float => float32? They'd certainly be more
>>>> obvious, but I can tell you I'd go crazy.
>>> Those get requested now and then, but I agree they are awful. They're a
>>> legacy from the C world where the sizes of basic types are unknown.
>> 
>> The first bullet on http://www.digitalmars.com/d/portability.html implies
>> some wiggle room on this issue.
>> 
>> I really liked how D got rid of size ambiguity at first... all the way
>> until
>> I started developing on machines that were not 32 bit.  When I don't care
>> about the true size, I feel guilty using "int" all over the place because
>> it is a fixed size.
>> 
>> I'd love to see both a fixed and variable size option available.  Maybe:
>> int - variable size
>> int32 - fixed size
>> int64 - fixed size
>> 
>> If that's done, the size of types become obvious when the programmer
>> cares about them and may make size-sensitive code more obvious.
> 
> Even on 64-bit systems int is 32-bit.

Are you talking about what D does or what is most efficient on a 64 bit
system?  If 32-bit integers are less efficient, then it's a crime to make
size-tolerant code use an inefficient size.



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