> It's funny because C opted to leave the number of bits machine dependent in the name of portability, but that turns out to have the opposite effect.
That depends on what you consider the portable part. In the era of proprietary mainframes operating on proprietary datasets, data portability probably didn't matter as much as code portability to perform the same sort of operation on another machine.
C's size-less `int`, `float`, etc allows the exact same code to compile on the native (high speed) sizes of the platform without any editing, `ifdef`s, etc.
(Side note: That's what bothers me a lot about the language wars -- the features of a language are based on the trade-offs between legibility, performance, and the environment from the era they were intended to be used in. Often both sides of those spats fail to remember that.)
That depends on what you consider the portable part. In the era of proprietary mainframes operating on proprietary datasets, data portability probably didn't matter as much as code portability to perform the same sort of operation on another machine.
C's size-less `int`, `float`, etc allows the exact same code to compile on the native (high speed) sizes of the platform without any editing, `ifdef`s, etc.
(Side note: That's what bothers me a lot about the language wars -- the features of a language are based on the trade-offs between legibility, performance, and the environment from the era they were intended to be used in. Often both sides of those spats fail to remember that.)