This document proposes a new type long long, an integral type with a guaranteed precision of at least 64 bits. This follows widespread de facto standard established by compiler vendors, who, faced with their customers' requests for large integer types, preferred to extend the language rather than change the size of an existing type.
Large data bases, large file systems, and object request broker systems need large integers. C9X should respond to this need by providing an integer type with a guaranteed precision of at least 64 bits.
At first glance, it might seem that this can be easily accomplished by requiring long to have at least 64 bits of precision. However, a C9X Standard that did this would force vendors to break their customers' code; not just unportable code that follows the widespread assumption of 32-bit long integers, but also any code that uses precompiled libraries and binary format data. Such a standard might well meet resistance from a significant fraction of vendors and users.
Vendors have considerable freedom of choice of the size of the basic data types when they introduce a completely new system (on which all of the software will be new and will share the same data sizes), but changing the size or representation of a basic data type on an existing system has widespread consequences.
Consider what happens when a customer modifies and recompiles an application on an implementation which has just changed the size of a long from 32 bits to 64 bits. Raw binary data files break. Perhaps more importantly, calls to libraries compiled with the old implementation break (the library source file says that the argument to a particular function is a long, which was 32 bits in the old implementation, so the function in the library object file expects to be passed a 32 bit type; the library header file, included by the application, also says that the argument to the same function is a long, which is now 64 bits, so the application passes a 64 bit type).
The consequence is that the customer cannot modify an application without recompiling (if they have source) or obtaining recompiled versions of (if they do not) all of the libraries used by that application. Everything has to change at once; there is no gentle transition. For this reason, many system vendors chose to avoid changing the sizes of the basic integer types and instead established long long as a de facto standard.
C9X should follow the vendors' practice and introduce long long as a new basic integer type with a guaranteed minimum precision of 64 bits.