Re: Int vs Word performance?

"Claus Reinke" wrote:

A while ago, I needed lots of fairly small positive numbers, together with a small number of flags for each, so I thought I'd switch from Int to Word, and map the flags to bits.

Since there are few guarantees about the size of a Word (or Int), surely it would be better to choose a definitely sized basic type, e.g. Word8 or Word16? I vaguely recall that ghc used to generate better code for definitely sized WordN than the generic unguaranteed-size Word. Regards, Malcolm