OT: Language for the ages

although often sizes such as 16 bits or 32 bits, an int is whatever sized group of bytes is most "comfortable and convenient" for the processor to handle. However, the defined size for an int must not be smaller than the defined size for a short int, nor larger than the defined size of a long int. Negative numbers are often represented in 2s complement notation, but that is purely implementation dependent, and CAN be done in other ways. A pointer is whatever size, and configuration, is needed to refer to a specific memory location. It can even be used to refer to a 16 bit offset within a segment, or even as a 32 bit quantity that is actually a structure of two 16 bit quantities (far * v segment:offset) It has sometimes been recommended, in order to further current forms of abuse, that the sizes of various variable types should not be relatively prime. FORTRAN (The Devils' DP Dictionary.) FORTRAN n [Acronym for Formula Translation system.] One of the earliest languages of any real height, level-wise, developed out of Speedcoding by Backus and Ziller for the IBM/704 in the mid-1950s in order to boost the sales of 80-column cards to engineers. In spite of regular improvements (including a recent option called STRUCTURE), it remains popular among engineers but despised elsewhere. Many rivals, with the benefit of hindsight, have crossed swords with the old workhorse! Yet FORTRAN gallops on, warts and all, more transportable than syphilis, fired by a bottomless pit of working subprograms. Lacking the compact power of APL, the intellectually satisfying elegance of ALGOL 68, the didactic incision of pascal, and the spurned universality of PL/1, FORTRAN survives, nay flourishes, thanks to superior investmental inertia. http://www.sysprog.net/quotcob.html http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_Dijkstra