Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Unleashed

Learning Common Types

Take an integer for example. Simple things such as the size of an integer are often taken for granted. Integers might not necessarily be the same size (or even in the same byte-order) on two different machines and operating systems. If you said 32 bits, you'd be somewhat correct. An integer on a 32-bit processor is in fact 32 bits in size. However, some languages such as C++ do not specify the size of an integer. They merely state that an integer is the size that can be handled by a single processing cycle for the target CPU. Okay. That's good for cross-platform languages such as C and C++. However, it makes it difficult for interoperability with other languages, such as Visual Basic.

The common type system does more than ...