It was a while ago indeed, and readability does play a big role. Also, it becomes easier to just type it out. Of course auto complete helps, but it's just easier.

We had it because we needed to compile for Windows and Linux on both 32 and 64 bit processors. So we defined all our Int32, Int64, uint32, uint64 and so on. There were a bunch of these definitions within the core header file with #ifndef and such.

The link to the -rc2 announcement is down?