Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated:
> On 02/20/2015 09:47 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> 
> >One can argue that a not-quite-C compiler for a PDP-10 that supported
> >6-, 7-, and 8-bit character types as well as 18-bit and 36-bit
> >integers would be useful, but by definition it wouldn't actually be C.
> 
> What does the C standard say about the physical size of an int in bits, 
> versus the largest and smallest integer that can be held in those bits?

  The constraints are:

	sizeof(short) <= sizeof(int)
	sizeof(int)   <= sizeof(long)
	sizeof(short) <  sizeof(long)

And the minumum ranges are:

	signed short	       -32,767 ..        32,767
	signed int	       -32,767 ..        32,767
	signed long	-2,147,483,647 .. 2,147,483,647

	unsigned short	             0 ..        65,536
	unsigned int	             0 ..        65,536
	unsigned long	             0 .. 4,294,967,296

Of course, they can be larger.  For instance, this is legal:

	sizeof(short) == 2
	sizeof(int)   == 4
	sizeof(long)  == 8

By defintion, sizeof(char) == 1, and the minimum range is

	signed char	-127 .. 127
	unsigned char	   0 .. 255

> Does C require 1's or 2's complement or can it support sign-magnitude 
> integers?

  Given the defined ranges, and the fact that signed overflow is undefined
behavior, I think C can be used on sign-magnitude and 1's complement
machines (however few those are).   Unsigned overflow is defined to wrap
around to 0.

  -spc