[M3devel] Release notes comments

[Jay K]

> Well, it would be great if somebody could
>
> (a) provide a short update for the release notes regarding LONGINT and
> (b) put this into two or three paragraphs (perhaps in their own
> document) that ordinary users may understand and want to know
>
> Olaf

 There is a new type LONGINT.
 It is a 64bit signed integer on all platforms except the native NT "NT386" platform.
 On NT386 is a 32bits, for now, but we would like to fix that.
 
or
 
 There is a new type LONGINT.
>> Abstractly, it is a signed integer type with at least as many bits as INTEGER.
 Concretely it is a 64bit signed integer on all platforms except the native NT "NT386" platform.
 On NT386 is a 32bits, for now, but we would like to fix that.
 
 
 
 -- end of relnote, begin commentary --
 
 
Depending on some philosophy.
Personally I adhere to a simpler philosophy where most integer types are of a fixed known size and will never ever change, you might as well encode the size in the name and use just those types -- int8_t, int16_t, in32_t, int64_t or INT8, INT16, INT32, INT64.
And then some other types are exactly the same size as a pointer -- ptrdiff_t, size_t, Modula-3 INTEGER -- and will shrink/grow to fit.
And there only exists "flat" address spaces.
 
 
There is the other philosophy that merely states minimum sizes for all the types and an ordering among them, that allows for, say, every integer type to be 64 bits and many other configurations.
 
 
 - Jay