For most purposes, you will always use Integer
, a signed
integer type which has the “natural” size of such types for the
machine. On most machines GPC runs on, this is a size of 32 bits, so
Integer
usually has a range of -2147483648..2147483647
(see Integer).
If you need an unsigned integer type, the “natural” choice is
Cardinal
, also called Word
. Like Integer
, it
has 32 bits on most machines and thus a range of
0..4294967295
(see Cardinal, Word).
These natural integer types should be your first choice for best
performance. For instance on an IA32 CPU operations with
Integer
usually work faster than operations with shorter
integer types like ShortInt
or ByteInt
(see below).