How to Implement Short Literals in C ?

Casting Integers to Short Literals in C

In C , writing integer literals in specific formats denotes their data types. However, writing a short literal may seem confusing.

Question: Implementing Short Literals

How can a short literal be written in C ? Existing knowledge includes:

• 2: int
• 2U: unsigned int
• 2L: long
• 2LL: long long
• 2.0f: float
• 2.0: double
• '2': char

Answer: Casting an Integer

While there is no direct short literal format, casting an integer to short provides the desired behavior:

<code class="cpp">((short)2)</code>

Behavior of the Casting

Despite not being a literal, the cast ensures similar behavior by coercing the integer to a short without explicitly allocating additional memory or performing unnecessary conversions.

Disassembly Example

Consider the following code:

<code class="cpp">a = 2L;
b = 2.0;
c = (short)2;
d = '';</code>

Compiling and disassembling this code results in:

movl    , _a
movl    , _b
movl    , _c
movl    , _d

This demonstrates that the compiler optimizes the code and stores 2 in all variables, regardless of their declared types.

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