> But your solution also doesn't involve deciding on the width of an integer - your solution is to use integers that have a minimum width.

We declare the minimum width for all variables. We don't use "int" in for loops and hope for the best. I wouldn't go as far as to say "we don't care". We don't worry too much for code that's mean to be portable. We obviously care in non-portable code. But the important point here is that we use the same conventions whether we are writing portable code or not.

> So from this, it sounded like you were talking about fixed width types.

C99 conventions are too radically new to be used across our entire codebase. Uglyness has nothing to do with it. The only way to ensure fixed widths without int_leastX conventions is to be intimately familiar with the platform while we are declaring our typedefs, or creating makefiles for our projects. And to that extent, we use only fixed with types.