N769 J11/97-133 Mandatory intmax_t Randy Meyers 23 Sept 1997 (It turns out that day I wrote this paper, Clive Feather independently proposed the same thing: intmax_t, uintmax_t, and their associated macros should be required to be defined in inttypes.h. His paper N765, part C, is relevant here.) The types intmax_t and uintmax_t and their associated types are currently optional (as are all other types) in inttypes.h. The committee had previously decided to make the "max" types optional to allow the possibility that an implementation had no bound on the size of its integer types. This strikes me as a very bad trade off: there do not exist any C or C++ implementations that do not limit the size of their integer types, and none are planned are planned as far as I know. On the other hand, knowing the largest integer type allows for some useful idioms: some_int_typedef x; printf("The value is %" PRIdMAX "\n", (intmax_t) x); I can see two possible scenarios for implementations with no maximum integer type. The first is an implementation with a LISP-like bignum type that dynamically grows as needed to hold values of increasing size. Such a type would be very different from the integer types. In fact, such a type would have more in common with VLAs than integers. Since bignum types have no set size, they would need to be represented as a reference to heap memory. Bignum types would either have to be forbidden from appearing in unions, or the standard would have to admit to the fact that only the pointer to the storage for the bignum value was a member of the union. Sizeof such a type could not be a constant expression. I believe that the standard promises enough about the properties of integer types that bignum types would not qualify as integers. The second scenario is a compiler with generalized integer type handling so that it could support integers of an arbitrary size picked at compile-time. Consider a syntax for type specifiers like int where the n is a integer constant expression that gives the size in bytes of the integer type. Objects of such a type would be represented as an block of contiguous bytes storing a value using binary representation. The operations on such integers would be compiled into calls to library routines that would be passed the known at compile-time size of the integers. A program like: N769 J11/97-133 Page 2 Mandatory intmax_t int<1000> i, j, k, m; i = j + k * m; might generate code like: __mul(&k, &m, &tmp1, 1000); __add(&tmp1, &j, &i, 1000); Such an implementation could handle on demand integers of arbitrary size. Such integers would meet all requirements of integer types in the Standard: size known at compile time, a pure binary representation without funny indirection or counts stored as part of the integer. And, it would be unreasonable to require that such an implementation to define intmax_t as int. However, I believe there is a simple solution. An implementation that supports arbitrarily large integers picked at compile-time should also support an command line option to set what intmax_t should be for the program being compiled. For example, the switch could set the maximum value of n allowed in int types, and the compiler could verify this assertion and also define intmax_t. Since: 1. there are no existing implementations with arbitrarily large integers, and since 2. if there are such implementations in the future, adding a command line switch is cheap, and since 3. having a maximum size integer known is useful, we should require intmax_t, uintmax_t, and their associated macros to be defined.