Is wchar_t just a typedef of unsigned short?

Question

for example, does:

wchar_t x;

translate to:

unsigned short x;

Answer 1

No, it doesn't. It translates to 'a wide character.' Making any assumptions about what that happens to be on a particular platform is incorrect, and defeats the entire purpose of having a wchar_t in the first place.

The point of using an abstraction is to separate the semantic meaning of the type from its underlying representation.