Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3506 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 07 September 2006 12:01 pm, Primm wrote:
> Sorry, but no idea what this means. Have googled around uint64_t for a
> while but the articles are too technical for me to be able to understand.
The unit64_t is a 64-bit integer data type defined by the C and C++ 
programming standards and is only of interest to programmers.
In general, a number is represented in a computer as either an integer (or a 
whole number), or as a floating point (eg. decimal) number. Floating point 
is essentially what some non-programmers might know as scientific notation. 
A floating point number has a mantissa, an exponent, and a sign (+ or -). 
Both integers and floating point have hardware (called registers) where the 
numbers can be operated on. when we talk 32-bit and 64-bit we generally 
mean addresses (or places in memory where things can be stored), or 
integers. The maximum unsigned decimal value that can be stored in a 32-bit 
register is 4294967295, and a maximum unsigned decimal value that can be 
stored is 18446744073709551615. What this means in very general terms of 
memory is that a program can only address 4GB of memory in a 32-bit system. 
remember, this 4GB limit also applies to disk files and other things. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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