What is the difference between Short and Character apart from processing?

Question

For what I know:

• \"bytewise\", it looks like they are the same (they are both 2 bytes long);
• Character, however, has more processing to i

Answer 1

They're currently incompatible, and that could never be changed. But to guess why they were originally different -- it's probably a really good idea to have different types for numerical data and letters, even if their contents work exactly the same way, just to avoid getting them mixed up. That would be bad.