Int and Char

Daryl Clevenger dlc at zog.cs.cmu.edu
Sat Jul 26 14:35:23 AEST 1986


I agree this is a major oversight in portability, but I think the main reason
that there is no 'signed' adjective for chars is that the representation and
interpretation for chars is too machine dependent.  That is, a machine can not
be told to interpret chars as signed if it only knows about unsigned
reprsentations.  Of course, as far as I know, any machine that uses signed
chars can interpret them as unsigned, so the 'unsigned' adjective can be
applied to chars.  Why can't everyone's machine be like a VAX :-)



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