• toddestan@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    LP is actually “Long Pointer”, which means 32 bits. Why is that called a long pointer? Because that’s what a long pointer was on win16. Same reason a DWORD (double word) is also 32 bits, because a word was 16 bits.

    I haven’t really done much with coding 64 bit Windows applications so I don’t if it’s the same, but Windows 16 bit roots was very obvious in win32.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 days ago

      I haven’t done much programming that makes use of the win32 types, but just from tech support and sysadmin type stuff I can confirm that DWORDs are still 32 bits. See them a lot in the Registry.

      Given Window’s (sometimes questionable) attempts to maintain backwards compatibility, and the fact that a lot of the OS functionality and sysadmin tools are, at best, kludge built up in layers over decades on top of the old tools, I would strongly suspect that the win32 types are still the exact same size-wise despite the now 64-bit underlying architecture.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Thanks for correcting me. Considering a long is also 32 bits, a “Long Pointer” being 32 bits makes sense.