Question

Many sources, including Microsoft, reference both the int and long type as being 4 bytes and having a range of (signed) -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. What is the point of having a long primitive type if it doesn’t actually provide a larger range of values?

Answer 1

The only things guaranteed about integer types are:

1. sizeof(char) == 1
2. sizeof(char) <= sizeof(short)
3. sizeof(short) <= sizeof(int)
4. sizeof(int) <= sizeof(long)
5. sizeof(long) <= sizeof(long long)
6. sizeof(char) * CHAR_BIT >= 8
7. sizeof(short) * CHAR_BIT >= 16
8. sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT >= 16
9. sizeof(long) * CHAR_BIT >= 32
10. sizeof(long long) * CHAR_BIT >= 64

The other things are implementation defined. Thanks to (4), both long and int can have the same size, but it must be at least 32 bits (thanks to (9)).