longs where uint64s could be

Folks,

While going over places where I might use compiler intrinsics for
things like ceil(log2(n))) and next power of 2(n), I noticed that a
lot of things that can't be fractional are longs instead of, say,
uint64s. Is this the case for historical reasons, or is there some
more specific utility to expressing as longs things that can only have
non-negative integer values? Did this practice pre-date our
now-required 64-bit integers?

Thanks in advance for any insights into this!

Best,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778

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