Addition of two chars produces int

Question

I\'ve made a simple program and compiled it with GCC 4.4/4.5 as follows:

int main ()
{
  char u = 10;
  char x = \'x\';
  char i = u + x;

  return 0;
}
         


        

Answer 1

When you do any arithmetic operation on char type, the result it returns is of int type.

See this:

char c = 'A';
cout << sizeof(c) << endl;
cout << sizeof(+c) << endl;
cout << sizeof(-c) << endl;
cout << sizeof(c-c) << endl;
cout << sizeof(c+c) << endl;

Output:

1
4
4
4
4

Demonstration at ideone : http://www.ideone.com/jNTMm