strange behavior of scanf for short int

Question

the code is as follows:

#include 
main()
{
    int m=123;
    int n = 1234;
    short int a;
    a=~0;
          


        

Answer 1

You're invoking Undefined Behavior when passing a pointer to a non-int to scanf's %d.

Likely, the compiler introduces padding bytes for alignment purposes and the values get stored in the padding bytes and not the "useful" bytes.

However, the compiler is free to do anything from raise a segfault / access violation to invoke nasal demons.