Question

As I’ve learned recently, a long in C/C++ is the same length as an int. To put it simply, why? It seems almost pointless to even include the datatype in the language. Does it have any uses specific to it that an int doesn’t have? I know we can declare a 64-bit int like so:

long long x = 0;

But why does the language choose to do it this way, rather than just making a long well…longer than an int? Other languages such as C# do this, so why not C/C++?

Answer 1

When writing in C or C++, every datatype is architecture and compiler specific. On one system int is 32, but you can find ones where it is 16 or 64; it’s not defined, so it’s up to compiler.

As for long and int, it comes from times, where standard integer was 16bit, where long was 32 bit integer – and it indeed was longer than int.