CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cinteger
shiven
shiven

Reputation: 421

why is the compiler treating character as an integer?

I have a small snippet of code. When I run this on my DevC++ gnu compiler it shows the following output:

 main ()
 {      char b = 'a';
        printf ("%d,", sizeof ('a'));
        printf ("%d", sizeof (b));
        getch ();
 }

OUTPUT: 4,1

Why is 'a' treated as an integer, whereas as b is treated as only a character constant?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1051

Answers (4)

ouah
ouah

Reputation: 145919

Because character literals are of type int and not char in C.

So sizeof 'a' == sizeof (int).

Note that in C++, a character literal is of type char and so sizeof 'a' == sizeof (char).

Upvotes: 9

Aftnix
Aftnix

Reputation: 4599

From IBM XL C/C++ documentation

A character literal contains a sequence of characters or escape sequences enclosed in single quotation mark symbols, for example 'c'. A character literal may be prefixed with the letter L, for example L'c'. A character literal without the L prefix is an ordinary character literal or a narrow character literal. A character literal with the L prefix is a wide character literal. An ordinary character literal that contains more than one character or escape sequence (excluding single quotes ('), backslashes () or new-line characters) is a multicharacter literal.

Character literals have the following form:

             .---------------------.
             V                     |
>>-+---+--'----+-character-------+-+--'------------------------><
   '-L-'       '-escape_sequence-'

At least one character or escape sequence must appear in the character literal. The characters can be from the source program character set, excluding the single quotation mark, backslash and new-line symbols. A character literal must appear on a single logical source line.

C A character literal has type int

Upvotes: 0

Derui Si
Derui Si

Reputation: 1105

In C, a character literal has type int.

In C++, a character literal that contains only one character has type char, which is an integral type.

In both C and C++, a wide character literal has type wchar_t, and a multicharacter literal has type int.

Upvotes: 0

AnT stands with Russia
AnT stands with Russia

Reputation: 320777

That's just the way it is in C. That's just how the language was originally defined. As for why... Back then virtually everything in C was an int, unless there was a very good reason to make it something else. So, historically character constants in C have type int.

Note BTW, in C nomenclature 'a' is called constant, not literal. C has string literals and no other literals.

Upvotes: 1

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