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 are adding these two characters with each other they are first being promoted to int.

The result of an addition is an rvalue which is implicitly promoted to type int if necessary, and if an int can contain the resulting value. This is true on any platform where sizeof(int) > sizeof(char). But beware of the fact that char might be treated as signed char by your compiler.

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