For example, suppose you do some bit manipulation in an integer variable and expect it to be of size 4: This may not be the case on all operating system platforms (see Listing 7).

Because this result is held in an integer variable, a message to display the value should use a formatting code to pad to four characters with leading zeros for codes that are numbered less than 1000.

The variable could be as simple as an integer or a string or as complex as a multidimensional array or an object.