Originally Posted by Perderabo

As for the long and short, one is 16 bits and the other 32 bits. You can't use 16 bits when you have 32 bits of data. The data won't fit and programmers care about that. You could use 32 bits when you have 16 bits of data, but you would be transmitting 16 bits of zeros for no good purpose. You would need to convince everyone else to do that. The protocols presently do not allow you to toss in extra zero bytes. But this would slow stuff down and waste space and programmers care about that.