On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 1:56 PM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace@me.com> wrote:
I deeply appreciate the need for unsigned fixed-width integers, but I oppose the exposure of Word, because there are no guarantees on what its fixed width is.  Hence, you cannot know when it will be dangerous to use.  By all means expose Word8, Word16, Word32, Word64 instead.  Their names provide a greater hint to the programmer that they have limitations, and that the programmer should check carefully whether those limitations are appropriate for their usage.

The problem is that now you cannot express "the largest fixed-sized, unsigned int that can be handled efficiently". Word64 is terribly slow on 32-bit machines.