Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1365

"Peter Flbutt" wrote ...

Agreed. I've only been in programming since the late '60s, so I've been through only half a dozen of these industry-wide changes in architectures.

More the point, though, I have also spent the last 15 years as a consultant helping companies migrate their applications from their previous "it will last forever" architecture to their current "it will last forever" architecture. If you look back over history, the attractive economic lifetime of a broadly described computer architecture (e.g., "CISC, little endian, 32 bit") is 10 to 15 years, and falling. The attractive economic lifetime of a major application is 30 to 35 years, and rising. You can therefore count on a major application being ported between very dissimilar architectures a minimum of three times before it is retired. The most common reason for retiring a major application is the owning corporation being absorbed into another corporation with their own solution to the problem the major application addressed.

The way physics is heading, the next two major transition will be to 128 bits with CPUs packaged in 16s or 64s (instead of 32-64 bits and 1s and 2s), then away from von Neumann architectures in their entirety. Damned if I know what those things will do with an arithmetic right shift of more bits than are in the type -- but I do know that programs maximally conformant to ANSI C will not depend on any particular behavior. :-)