[Insight-developers] Platform-independent type names and 64-bit integers

[Brad King]

Hello all,

Recently there has been interest in adding support for the NRRD file 
format's 64-bit integer types.  In order to do this properly we need to 
use a 64-bit integer type on every platform.  There is no basic C 
integer type that is commonly 64 bits in size, but there is at least one 
type (long, long long, or __int64) available on every platform we 
support that is 64-bits.

Not long ago I added a set of platform-independent type names to VTK 
with names like vtkTypeInt64 and vtkTypeUInt8 (see 
VTK/Common/vtkType.h).  I propose adding a similar set of typedefs to 
ITK to address this problem.  Platform-independent I/O is generally much 
easier with such types anyway.

I propose names such as "itk::TypeInt32" or "itk::Type::Int32" for the 
typedefs, but I'm open to suggestions for better names.

Comments?
-Brad