I seriously wonder what&#x27;s wrong with using an int and the original count down construct. You have to think about it on 16 or 32 bit platforms, but this statement from the link:<p>&gt;&gt; Especially consider the case of an index into a string (char *) on a 64 bit platform. size_t is the appropriate type for an index because the limited range of int is not nearly enough.<p>That&#x27;s just bull in most applications. Even if you could run 1 trillion iterations per second, the loop would take 2^23 seconds to complete or about 97 days. In general if you&#x27;re not doing &quot;big data&quot; and int will index an array just fine thank you. And that&#x27;s indexing bytes, it should index any other type just fine in any case - assuming of course that a pointer and int are the same size.