Interesting C question

It was thus said that the Great Bryan Pope once stated: Because a C compiler is free to treat an unspecified char declaration as signed or unsigned (i.e. in the declaration ``char c;'' c can either be a signed quantity or unsigned quantity). You need specify explicitely if you want signed or unsigned characters (okay, some compilers let you set the default signness of chars, but not all). To be safe, you probably want something like: #include <limits.h> #if (UCHAR_MAX == 255U) typedef unsigned char u8; #else # error No integral type is 8 bits on this platform #endif #if (UINT_MAX == 65535U) typedef unsigned short u16; #elif (USHRT_MAX == 65535U) typedef unsigned int u16; #elif (UCHAR_MAX == 65535U) typedef unsigned char u16; #else # error No integral type is 16 bits on this platform #endif #if (ULONG_MAX == 4294967295UL) typedef unsigned long u32; #elif (UINT_MAX == 4294967295UL) typedef unsigned int u32; #elif (USHRT_MAX == 4294967295UL) typedef unsigned short u32; #elif (UCHAR_MAX == 4294967295UL) typedef unsigned char u32; #else # error No integral type is 32 bites on this platform #endif This code should generate types of the appropriate bit sizes for most of the general use systems in use today, and yet alert you to any problems or assumptions that you might have when porting to a new system. A word is *NOT* a 16 bit quantity (well, except for 16 bit systems), despite what Microsoft says. -spc (Has had to deal with portability issues)