Dynamic arrays, basic type names, auto

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Markus Koskimies" <markus at reaaliaika.net> wrote in message 
news:g56jog$1h9i$24 at digitalmars.com...
> 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).

I get the impression that people who think that "word == 2 bytes" tend to be 
long-time Windows programmers.  Since that's, well, pretty much the only 
place where that's true.