Re: Wide characters and GCC

[Michael Hayes <m dot hayes at elec dot canterbury dot ac dot nz>]

Joseph S. Myers writes:
 > On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Michael Hayes wrote:
 > 
 > > While chars are stored as 32-bits on the C4x there is an underlying
 > > assumption that only the 8 LSBs are significant.  Since sizeof(char)
 > > = sizeof(short) = sizeof(int) on the C4x, you generally would use an
 > > int type to store larger constants.
 > 
 > ISO C says that all bits of unsigned char are significant.  While C99
 > allows signed char to have padding bits, ISO C++ doesn't.  (Also, I doubt
 > GCC really supports integer types with padding bits, even though
 > c-tree.texi documents what TYPE_SIZE and TYPE_PRECISION are for them.)

OK, I chose the wrong word here.  Yes, all the bits of an unsigned
char are significant on the C4x; you can perform 32-bit arithmetic
using chars if you wish.  But if you wanted to write portable code you
wouldn't be doing this.

Michael.