How Do I Write Short Literals in C ?

Writing Short Literals in C

In C , you may encounter the need to assign a short integer value to a variable. Understanding how to represent short literals in C is crucial for working with numerical data correctly.

Existing Literals

You are familiar with various literal representation for different data types:

• 2: Integer (int)
• 2U: Unsigned integer (unsigned int)
• 2L: Long (long)
• 2LL: Long Long (long long)
• 2.0f: Float (float)
• 2.0: Double (double)
• '2': Character (char)

Short Literals

Unfortunately, there is no direct syntax for short literals in C . However, you can use casting to achieve the desired result. Casting involves converting one data type to another.

To represent a short literal, you can cast an integer to a short data type as follows:

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

This expression effectively creates a short integer value of 2. The compiler optimizes the code, so it's interpreted as a short literal internally.

Example

The following code demonstrates how to use short literals through casting:

<code class="cpp">short a = (short)2;
short b = (short)10;</code>

In this example, the variables a and b are of the short data type and have values 2 and 10, respectively.

Disassembly

To ensure that the compiler is efficient, we can disassemble the compiled code to verify its behavior. Compiling and disassembling the following code:

<code class="cpp">int main() {
    short a = (short)2;
    return 0;
}</code>

results in the assembly code:

movl , -4(%rbp)  

As you can see, the value 2 is stored directly in the memory location, indicating that the optimization was successful.

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