> I too find it awkward, but in fact, the length of an int is always platform
> dependent, we have just gotten (God, I hate that word) used to 16 bit ints
> on Intel platforms.  Normally an int is the same length as the predominant
> register length, which on a PIC, is clearly 8 bits.  A 16 bit int is not
> part of the C standard.

The C standard does not specify the size nor the representation of any
numeric types (e.g. a machine that used 5 10-state tubes to store an INT
would be perfectly fine) except for the following requirements:

[1] A signed char must support values from -127 to 127
[2] A signed int or short must support values from -32767 to 32767
[3] A signed long must support values from -(2^31-1) to (2^31-1)
[4] An unsigned char must support values from 0 to 255
[5] An unsigned int or short must support values from 0 to 65535
[6] An unsigned long must support values from 0 to (2^32-1)
[7] A char [with default signed-ness] must be capable of storing all of the
    characters in the standard C character set as positive integers (this
    latter requirement primarily means that on 8-bit machines which use the
    EBCDIC character set, characters must be unsigned).
[8] sizeof(long) >= sizeof(int) >= sizeof(short) >= sizeof(char) == 1

I think, though I'm not positive, that the following also apply:

[A] Any value that can be stored in a signed type must fit in all "larger"
    signed types.
[B] Any value that can be stored in an unsigned type must fit in all "larger"
    unsigned types.
[C] Any non-negative value that fits in a signed type must fit in the
    corresponding unsigned type.

It's perfectly acceptable for machines to have sizeof(int)==1 if a char
can hold suitably-large values.  For example, on the TI 3205x, ALL inst-
ructions to read/write memory use 16-bit values.  While it's not terribly
difficult to parse out the two halves of a word, the compiler instead
just defines "char" to be a 16-bit word--the same size as a short or an
int.  A bit wasteful of data space, perhaps, but a major saver of time and
codespace.

Unfortunately, the common PIC compiler's notion that an int is 8 bits and
a long is 16 bits fails under tests 2, 3, 5, and 6 above.