on the use of char

[George Staikos]

Hi folks,

   I'd like to point out that we need to be careful about the use of "char" 
for storing numbers in KDE.  Some platforms have unsigned char type, others 
have signed char type.  I happen to have both.  Consequently I have seen, on 
a regular basis, broken KDE applications on one or both of my machines due to 
code that assumes signedness or unsignedness of char.  Yes, I have also 
implemented this bug before.

   So if your goal is to store a relatively small number and not waste space, 
can I recommend either using a bitfield int, or thinking again "is it really 
worth the possible bugs in order to save 3 bytes out of, ex., ~5MB"?

  (really, explicitly specifying the signedness may only help half of the 
cases I've seen.  don't go there...)

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/