Size of various types is very fundamental, and has to be well understood by programmers using C. By and large, for Fractint it was. The Microsoft DOS compiler had: short = int = two bytes long = four bytes Until recently, most other systems (e.g. Unix/Linux) had: short = two bytes int = long = four bytes Until the advent of 64 bit cpus, the most reliable of these were short and long, which you could count on as being 16 and 32 bits It is unlikely to gain much to search for "2" :-) The parser pretty much had a different set of authors from the rest of Fractint, of varying skill and experience - Mark Peterson, George Martin, and Chuck Ebbert. I've studied the code enough to understand it and added some functions. Any hardcoded assumption that int = 16 bits would have created a problem with the Linux port. We generally tried to stick to short or long when the size mattered and avoid int except where the size didn't matter. Tim