On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 11:58:11 -0800, you wrote:

>On Friday, Apr 2, 2004, at 03:14 US/Pacific, Peter L. Peres wrote:
>
>>> IMNSHO, you would need to be close to insane to use 24 bit integers =
in
>>> a C program!
>>
>> Why ? What if the word length is 24bits ? What if it's 36bits ? =
Usually
>> when there is a C compiler for such a target it has a datatype that
>> supports the 'native' word width.
>>
>Using an "int" that happens to be 24 bits (or some other odd number) is
>fine, but explicitly picking a 24bit datasize because 16 is too small,
>and 32 is too big, is so non-portable that it would be a bad idea.
>(Now, you can probably do things so that the 24bit quantities are
>32 bits in compilers that don't have 24bit integers and have the best
>of both worlds, but it will take some care...)

But the reason for using 'just right' sizes would be to preserve =
resources where they are limited -
in this environment, fitting the code into the part is usually way more =
important than portability.
Embedded apps on the PIC scale are very rarely ported to a different =
processor or compiler - I would
happily sacrifice portability if it meant I could squeeze more code in.=20

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