Tuesday 27 February 2018

"Zeiger" The Missing C Type Link

I'm just looking at an old C Compiler, the first C compiler I ever used, actually... And, I'll be honest, I didn't live with C long, I moved into C++ pretty quickly.  So much so, I never actually read the this C Compiler's Documentation, here for posterity, is an exert...

Pre-defined Data Types
----------------------

      Type        sizeof      Bits            Range
      ----        ------      ----            -----
  unsigned char      1          8             0 to 255
  char               1          8          -128 to 127
  enum               2         16        -32768 to 32767
  unsigned short     2         16             0 to 65535
  short              2         16        -32768 to 32767
  unsigned int       2         16             0 to 65535
  int                2         16        -32768 to 32767
  unsigned long      4         32             0 to 4294967295
  long               4         32   -2147483648 to 2147483647
  <pointer>          4         32
  float              4         32   (+-)3.4E-38 to (+-)3.4E+38
  double            10         80 (+-)3.3E-4932 to (+-)1.2E+4932
  long double       10         80 (+-)3.3E-4932 to (+-)1.2E+4932
  Zeiger             4         32             0 to 4294967295


I have never heard of the "Zeiger" type, it's simply an unsigned 32 bit integer, but where does that name come from?

It's a German word, meaning pointer or hand, so I can only assume it's a pointer to some memory location and the machine this compiler is for, if I recall correctly had a 4 megabyte maximum address space, plus 64K of addressable ROM.  So a Zeiger would be useful to parse over any location in both, however it's not clearly stated in the information.

Zeiger is a reserved word in this compiler, and yet it purports to be ANSI compliant... Hmmm.... Thoughts as ever in the comments below.

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