Question

In C:
My string length function is returning a size_t value?

Why is it not returning a integer which is conventional? And one more thing I noticed was that when I was trying concatenate this string with another string I received a bus error when I ran the program.

Context: I was kind of playing with gmp library and converting big numbers to strings and I end up with the above situation.

What kind of a string is that? Is my operating system playing a role in this issue? I use a MAC, 64-bit OS.

Edited: The error message I received was:

: warning: format ‘%d’ expects type ‘int’, but argument 3 has type ‘size_t’

Thanks!

@all: Thanks for the answers but I thought I will put the bus error as another question because it seems to be a different issue.

Answer 1

The problem is int might be not wide enough to store the whole range of possible length values. For example on 64-bit you can have a string longer than 4 gigabytes and if int is 32 bit you can’t possibly return length of such a long string via an int variable.