why integer size says 4 bytes on 64 bit processor

Shakil Khan korikov.zk at gmail.com
Mon May 25 10:55:44 UTC 2009


Hi All,

Pardon me if I am writing this mail to the wrong group as I am too new to
BSD and programming stuff. You can redirect me to right group without
howling. By seeing some recent conversations(About the top status ;)) in
this group it made me nervous to ask for a silly question like this, but it
intrigued my mind too much so thought to delve into it keeping aside my
fear.

I have a 64bit intel processor, Dual core machine and I have installed 64
bit Linux as well as FreeBSD and thought of seeing the size of integer. On
both the platform my integer is showing 4 bytes which is 32 bit. I thought
integer are the most basic of the data types and governs the architecture as
32 bit or 64 bit, so why integer shows me 4bytes instead of 8. Does this
means that even on 64 bit architecture we are limited to just 4GB of RAM.

Please explain.

Thanks in advance.


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