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288 points Twirrim | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 22:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.455s | source

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D made a great leap forward with the following:

1. bytes are 8 bits

2. shorts are 16 bits

3. ints are 32 bits

4. longs are 64 bits

5. arithmetic is 2's complement

6. IEEE floating point

and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!

Oh, and Unicode was the character set. Not EBCDIC, RADIX-50, etc.

bmacho ◴[18 Oct 24 12:20 UTC] No.41878715[source]▶

> D made a great leap forward

> and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!

Nah. It is actually pretty bad. Type names with explicit sizes (u8, i32, etc) are way better in every way.

replies(1): >>41884134 #

1. WalterBright ◴[18 Oct 24 22:38 UTC] No.41884134[source]▶

> Type names with explicit sizes (u8, i32, etc) are way better in every way

Until one realizes that the entire namespace of innn, unnn, fnnn, etc., is reserved.

replies(1): >>41895432 #

2. bmacho ◴[20 Oct 24 14:03 UTC] No.41895432[source]▶

You are right, they come with a cost.

C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte