LONG

[muta...@gmail.com]

From memory, OS/2 and others used a type of
"LONG" rather than the C90-defined "long".

That seems like a laughable "abstraction" to me.

As if one day they are going to go:

#define LONG short

and everything will work.

You need a special way of even printing an abstract
type. "%ld" won't cut it if it is not exactly "long".

But at least theoretically, did "LONG" have any coherent
meaning at all?

Minimum minimums and minimum maximums?

Were values of this type meant to be retrieved by other
APIs, never directly set or retrieved?

Perhaps it could have even been a typedef struct?

What were the rules?

Did the rules help anyone?

Thanks. Paul.