On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
A cell is an integer the size of a pointer; that's a "long" in gcc. I don't think sizeof(int) == 4 always holds.
Theoretically could there be an architecture, where an int is bigger than a pointer (cray?), but if we don't support those, nobody will bite us, i bet. SuperH has 32bit chars. Would be nice to have some game consoles supported by OpenBIOS somewhen ;) but this is neither an issue nor should it hurt due to the IEEE standard
FYI, for MIPS platforms you can select between 32-bit and 64-bit ints with a compiler option. It probably only makes sense for MIPS64*/Linux if at all, and 64-bit ints are non-default and detectable with the _MIPS_SZINT macro.
Anyway, <stdint.h> is probably the right header to get types of fixed sizes. Unfortunately, it's part of glibc rather than gcc, for a reason unknown to me, at least with gcc 2.95.