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From: bmk@m2.csc.ti.com (Brian M Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Subject: sizeof('a')
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.210440.16325@csc.ti.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 21:04:40 GMT
Sender: bmk@csc.ti.com (Brian M Kennedy)
Distribution: usa
Organization: TI Computer Science Center, Dallas
Lines: 32

>=daniel=>
>This means that the following program is legal in C++ and
>ANSI C, and has different meanings in the two languages.
>Am I correct in thinking that a design goal of Bjarne's was
>to avoid the possibility of such a program?
>Is that design goal sufficiently important to motivate x3j16
>to change the type of 'c' to int?
>[... program exercising sizeof('a') ...]

Yes and no.
Yes, being consistent with C would have been a strong enough reason
for Bjarne to have made the type of 'c' be int in the first place,
EXCEPT that there is a stronger reason to have 'c' be char in C++:
overloading.

If I write:

	cout << 'A';
	cout << 65;

I want overload resolution to choose operator<<(ostream&, char) for
the first call and operator<<(ostream&, int) for the second.  If 'A'
was type int then the first call would print the int value of A rather
than the character A.  That would be very ugly.

This is discussed by E&S (ARM) on p.9, 2.5.2, in the annotations.

=======================================
== Brian M. Kennedy <bmk@csc.ti.com> ==
== Computer Systems Laboratory ========
== Computer Science Center ============
== Texas Instruments ==================