My conclusion from here would be that it is time to move away from using ints, longs, etc. and use the Smalltalk approach instead. I fail to see the benefit where the programmer has to choose between int and long.

The only time when a programmer should have to pick an exact memory size for a variable is when doing hardware level programming. At the OS level the speed advantage and the fact that a lot of it is hardware level gives a big advantage.

That application programmers are still working in C and C++ is sad. And as somebody who is going back into C++ programming after not doing any since Windows 95 came out, let me tell you it has not gotten any prettier in the past decade.

Jay