Why is it called 'wchar_t' and not simply 'wchar'?

Question

I've often wondered why C++ went with the name wchar_t instead of simply wchar, and I've never been able to find an answer. Search engines are no help because they think I'm asking about Windows' WCHAR type. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think this was a 'phase' in the growing up of C and C++. The need for some new types was felt but adding new keywords is always disputed. Some code was already using wchar, far less code would have used wchar_t. Note that size_t and diff_t are of the same era.

Answer 2

That's a legacy from C, where wchar_t is a typedef, and typedefs have that suffix in the C Standard Library.

Answer 3

The C standard library has used the _t suffix for many of the types that are defined in the library (as opposed to the types that are baked into C itself as keywords).

For example, there's time_t, wchar_t, uint32_t, size_t, ptrdiff_t, div_t, etc.

Of interest (to me anyway) is that the C standard doesn't reserve names of that form for itself. The C standard does indicate that names that start with "str", "mem", and a few other prefixes might be added to the standard in the future, but it doesn't do the same with names that end in "_t" - except that names that start with "int" or "uint" and end with "_t" might be added to <stdint.h> in the future. However, POSIX does reserve all names that end in "_t".