-When calling functions, you need not worry about the difference between
-pointers of various types, or between pointers and integers. On most
-machines, there's no difference anyway. As for the few machines where
-there is a difference, all of them support Standard C prototypes, so you can
-use prototypes (perhaps conditionalized to be active only in Standard C)
-to make the code work on those systems.
+It used to be ok to not worry about the difference between pointers
+and integers when passing arguments to functions. However, on most
+modern 64-bit machines pointers are wider than @code{int}.
+Conversely, integer types like @code{long long int} and @code{off_t}
+are wider than pointers on most modern 32-bit machines. Hence it's
+often better nowadays to use prototypes to define functions whose
+argument types are not trivial.