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Iirc, C was also designed by committee, and a lot of industry players got some of their grubby hands on the spec... (I could be wrong) but I belive the utter mess that is short/long/char sizes arises from hardware manufacturers wanting their code to be "trivially portable" across platforms with different machine words.


No, the different sizes were done by the original creators, not by some committee. They had to: a PDP-11 is a 16-bit machine, a PDP-10 is 36-bit, etc.


thanks, I think I was crossing stories between the C committee and the IEEE 754 committee.




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