Integer conversions too pedantic in 64-bit

[Don]

David Nadlinger wrote:
> On 2/17/11 8:56 AM, Denis Koroskin wrote:
>> I second that. word/uword are shorter than ssize_t/size_t and more in
>> line with other type names.
>>
>> I like it.
> 
> I agree that size_t/ptrdiff_t are misnomers and I'd love to kill them 
> with fire, but when I read about »word«, I intuitively associated it 
> with »two bytes« first – blame Intel or whoever else, but the potential 
> for confusion is definitely not negligible.
> 
> David

Me too. A word is two bytes. Any other definition seems to be pretty 
useless.

The whole concept of "machine word" seems very archaic and incorrect to 
me anyway. It assumes that the data registers and address registers are 
the same size, which is very often not true.
For example, on an 8-bit machine (eg, 6502 or Z80), the accumulator was 
only 8 bits, yet size_t was definitely 16 bits.
It's quite plausible that at some time in the future we'll get a machine 
with 128-bit registers and data bus, but retaining the 64 bit address 
bus. So we could get a size_t which is smaller than the machine word.

In summary: size_t is not the machine word.