Dynamic arrays, basic type names, auto

[Markus Koskimies]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:55:35 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> "Markus Koskimies" <markus at reaaliaika.net> wrote in message
> news:g55see$1h9i$15 at digitalmars.com...
>> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:57:54 -0400, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>
>> - byte, word, dword; these are well defined due to historical reasons.
>> Change them and you confuse lots of people.
>>
>>
> A "word" is well-defined to be the native data size of a given chip
> (memory, cpu, etc). People who have done a lot of PC programming tend to
> forget that or be unaware of it and end up with the mistaken inpression
> that it's well-defined to be "two bytes", which has never been true in
> the general-case.

Hmmh, I disagree. "word" might mean in the history the width of the 
processor data paths, but nowadays it is 16-bit unsigned even in 
microcontrollers and DPSs (although DSPs rarely follow fixed width of 
processor words, e.g. having 20-bit data path, 24/48-bit special 
registers and accessing memory with 16-bit granularity).