guidelines on usage of size_t and offset_t?
<p>This is probably a C++ 101 question: I'm curious what the guidelines are for using <code>size_t</code> and <code>offset_t</code>, e.g. what situations they are intended for, what situations they are not intended for, etc. I haven't done a lot of portable programming, so I have typically just used something like <code>int</code> or <code>unsigned int</code> for array sizes, indexes, and the like. However, I gather it's preferable to use some of these more standard typedefs when possible, so I'd like to know how to do that properly.</p>

<p>As a follow-up question, for development on Windows using Visual Studio 2008, where should I look to find the actual typedefs? I've found <code>size_t</code> defined in a number of headers within the VS installation directory, so I'm not sure which of those I should use, and I can't find <code>offset_t</code> anywhere.</p>
