Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:38:10 07/16/01
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On July 16, 2001 at 14:58:04, Tord Romstad wrote: >On July 11, 2001 at 23:36:39, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>2. The ANSI standards committee did the same stupid thing with bit fields that >>they did with other key issues, "this is left to the vendor's discretion..." >>Ie is a char signed or unsigned by default? Depends on the compiler. > >Please tell me you are just kidding. I have always assumed that chars are >signed by default, and a lot of my code depends on it. Are you saying that >my code could stop working when I switch to another compiler? No. Unadorned char is either signed or unsigned, depending upon the implementation. The reason for strange things like this is preexisting code. Imagine you have have a collection of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and suddenly a restriction is imposed which breaks it. Personally, I would have gone ahead and broken all of the code. After all: int foo; long bar; do not leave the signed nature of foo and bar up to chance for whatever compiler is used, they must be signed. You can get a copy of the ANSI and ISO standards for $18 in PDF format and it will prevent you from discovering a lot of headaches later. You can get a pre-ratified draft of the standard for free.
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