In C Left shift (char) 0xFF by 8 and cast it to int

Question

On left shift of (char) 0xff by 8 and casting it to int we get -256 or 0xffffff00. Can somebody explain why this should happen?

#include 
int         


        

Answer 1

char is nothing but signed char. So char c = 0xFF will be -1 . When you left shift -1 by 8 bits you get -256.