where does "CARD18" come from?

[Jamey Sharp]

They're defined in the X11 core protocol specification:

http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xproto/x11protocol.html#Common_Types

I believe "CARD" is short for "cardinal", as in "cardinal numbers".

Regarding X vs. Lisp: I've been told that the X design decision to make
XIDs 29 bits wide was because (at least some) Lisp implementations of
the day had 29-bit integers; the other bits in each word were used to
tag pointers vs. unboxed integers, I guess. So they're not so completely
unrelated as you might think.

Jamey

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 07:12:44AM +0200, wempwer at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was wondering where the names of various data types listed here may
> come from:
> http://www.x.org/wiki/XSessionManagementProtocol#Data_Types
> 
> Most of them are clear, but these ones picked my interest:
> 
>  CARD8
>  a one-byte unsigned integer
> 
>  CARD16
>  a two-byte unsigned integer
> 
>  CARD32
>  a four-byte unsigned integer 
> 
> Do you know what is the etymology of these type names? Do they mean
> "character...", but what does "d" stand for? In Lisp "car" is a
> function that returns the first element of the list but I think Xorg
> has nothing to do with Lisp.
> 
> History is interesting ;)
> -- 
> <wempwer at gmail.com>
> _______________________________________________
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