Bartosz about Chapel

[bearophile]

Walter:

> Short and byte have many decades of use being 16 bits and 8 bits. I don't know 
> anyone who is confused by this.

"byte" and "ubyte" names sometimes cause problems because bytes are usually unsigned values:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

>The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards exist that mandate the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte.<

This is a (minor) wart of D. C# got this better, using the "sbyte" and "ubyte" names. We have discussed this in past :-)

When I program in D, I take care of keeping often in my mind that "int" is not an integer number, but a unchecked signed 2-complement 32-bits-wide bit field. Forgetting it causes several bugs and troubles.

Bye,
bearophile