9fans archive / 2007 / 04 / 601 /    prev next

From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@cor...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:22:56 -0400

> It is just an arithmetic type with width at least 1, and
> conversion rules aimed at maximizing its Boolean nature.
> 
> It is a pity that the result of relational expressions (for
> example) cannot be Boolean, for reasons of historical
> compatibility, but that's not the fault of _Bool (or plain
> "bool" as it is meant to be used via <stdbool.h>).

this is different from how c has traditionally done types.
c types mapped to what the hardware provides.  unless
you're working on a hc6508 or similar, you probablly don't
have bit-wide memory access.

it's more in the spirit of oberon, or pascal which have
had more formally defined and machine independent
types.

- erik