i18n

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Friday 17 March 2006 1:07 pm, Bill Horne wrote:
> If Jerry gave incorrect information, step up and refute: that's what
> this list if for. Disagreement does not require discourtesy.
Thanks Bill,
And Jerry did not give incorrect information, but I can see where what I 
said was misleading as I was talking about the underlying programming 
language that most Unix and Linux commands and utilities are written with 
(c and C++ specifically). Where newer languages, such as Java took I18N and 
Unicode into consideration when the language was designed. In C (and C++) a 
char is (generally) an 8-bit integer type, a short is generally 16-bits, 
and int is generally 32-bits and a long is 32-bits on a 32-bit system and 
64-bits on an LP64 compliant 64-bit system. 
I use the term "generally", because the C standard sets a set of ranges and 
does not specify the actual sizes. It does say that a char < short <= int 
<= long.
(C99 also defined long long, but C89 does not). 
On an ISO C compliant system, and int could be 64-bits and a long could be 
128 bits, but those who developed the LP64 convention decided that changing 
the size of an int from 32-bits would be too disruptive. 


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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