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Writing Short Literals in C
In C , there are predefined literals for various data types, such as int, long, and double. However, there is no dedicated literal for short. To write a short literal, you can use a cast, as demonstrated below:
<code class="cpp">((short)2) // This assigns the short literal value 2 to a variable of type short</code>
While not an explicit short literal, this approach behaves similarly and effectively assigns a short value to a variable.
Despite the absence of a direct short literal notation, the compiler typically optimizes the code such that it treats the casted integer as a short, without incurring significant performance overhead. For example, the following code:
<code class="cpp">short a = 2L; float b = 2.0; short c = (short)2; char d = '';</code>
When compiled and disassembled, results in the following machine code:
movl , _a movl , _b movl , _c movl , _d
This indicates that the compiler directly assigned the value 2 to all four variables, regardless of their data types. Therefore, you do not need to be overly concerned about performance implications when using this casting approach to write short literals.
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