| natn | n-byte natural number type |
Dirty
| Syntax |
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| Description | The natn (n-byte natural number) types are machine-dependent types that occupy a specified number of bytes. By contrast, the nat type is in principle a machine-independent and mathematical type (it overflows, however, when the value is too large or small, that is, when the value does not fit into 4 bytes).
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| Example |
var counter1 : nat1 % Range is 0 .. 255
var counter2 : nat2 % Range is 0 .. 65536
var counter4 : nat4 % Range is 0 .. 4294967295
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| Details | In Turing, the range of the nat is 0 to 4294967294, which means that the nat4 type allows one more value, 4294967295. This extra value is used in nat to represent the state of being uninitialized. The natn types allow use of all possible values that fit into n bytes and thereby eliminates checking for initialization. The natn types are like the C language types short unsigned, unsigned, and long unsigned, except that the number of bytes occupied by the C types depends on the particular C compiler.
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| See also | the intn types which are n byte integer values. See also nat and int.
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