[danhau]

How will you know if your integer type is adequate for the problem at hand, if you don‘t know its size?

Choosing the right type is a function of signedness, upper/lower bound (number of things), and sometimes alignment. These are fundamental properties of the problem domain. Guesstimating is simply not doing the required work.

[kevin_thibedeau]

C specifies minimum sizes. That's all you need 99% of the time. I'm always annoyed by the people who assume int is 32-bits. You can't assume that in portable code. Use long or ensure the code works with 16-bit ints. That is how the type system was meant to be used. int was supposed to reflect the natural word size of the machine so you could work with the optimum integral type across mismatched platforms. 64-bit platforms have mostly abandoned that idea and 8-bit never got to participate but the principle is embedded in the language.

[SkiFire13]

This doesn't really agree with this OP statement:

> The programmer should rather prescribe intent and shouldn't constantly think about what size this should exactly have.

You still have to constantly think about size! Except now you have to think about _minimum_ size, and possibly use a too big data type because the correctly sized one for your platform had a guaranteed minimum size that's too small for what you want to do.

[donkeybeer]

The idea is mostly that we shouldn't worry. The user of the lib on an arduino will feed it arduino sized problems and the amd64 user will likewise larger problems. Again I think just think of the transition from 32 to 64 bit. Most ranges are "input"/"user " dependent and it would have been needlessly messy to have to even with automatic conversion help rewrite say every i32 to i64 or which ones to convert.

[direwolf20]

That's size_t. What about counting milliseconds?