C Language: Why int variable can store char?

The getchar function (and similar character input functions) returns an int because of EOF. There are cases when (char) EOF != EOF (like when char is an unsigned type).

Also, in many places where one use a char variable, it will silently be promoted to int anyway. Ant that includes constant character literals like 'A'.

getchar() attempts to read a byte from the standard input stream. The return value can be any possible value of the type unsigned char (from 0 to UCHAR_MAX), or the special value EOF which is specified to be negative.

On most current systems, UCHAR_MAX is 255 as bytes have 8 bits, and EOF is defined as -1, but the C Standard does not guarantee this: some systems have larger unsigned char types (9 bits, 16 bits...) and it is possible, although I have never seen it, that EOF be defined as another negative value.

Storing the return value of getchar() (or getc(fp)) to a char would prevent proper detection of end of file. Consider these cases (on common systems):

• if char is an 8-bit signed type, a byte value of 255, which is the character ÿ in the ISO8859-1 character set, has the value -1 when converted to a char. Comparing this char to EOF will yield a false positive.

• if char is unsigned, converting EOF to char will produce the value 255, which is different from EOF, preventing the detection of end of file.

These are the reasons for storing the return value of getchar() into an int variable. This value can later be converted to a char, once the test for end of file has failed.

Storing an int to a char has implementation defined behavior if the char type is signed and the value of the int is outside the range of the char type. This is a technical problem, which should have mandated the char type to be unsigned, but the C Standard allowed for many existing implementations where the char type was signed. It would take a vicious implementation to have unexpected behavior for this simple conversion.

The value of the char does indeed depend on the execution character set. Most current systems use ASCII or some extension of ASCII such as ISO8859-x, UTF-8, etc. But the C Standard supports other character sets such as EBCDIC, where the lowercase letters do not form a contiguous range.

getchar is an old C standard function and the philosophy back then was closer to how the language gets translated to assembly than type correctness and readability. Keep in mind that compilers were not optimizing code as much as they are today. In C, int is the default return type (i.e. if you don't have a declaration of a function in C, compilers will assume that it returns int), and returning a value is done using a register - therefore returning a char instead of an int actually generates additional implicit code to mask out the extra bytes of your value. Thus, many old C functions prefer to return int.

C requires int be at least as many bits as char. Therefore, int can store the same values as char (allowing for signed/unsigned differences). In most cases, int is a lot larger than char.

char is an integer type that is intended to store a character code from the implementation-defined character set, which is required to be compatible with C's abstract basic character set. (ASCII qualifies, so do the source-charset and execution-charset allowed by your compiler, including the one you are actually using.)

For the sizes and ranges of the integer types (char included), see your <limits.h>. Here is somebody else's limits.h.

C was designed as a very low-level language, so it is close to the hardware. Usually, after a bit of experience, you can predict how the compiler will allocate memory, and even pretty accurately what the machine code will look like.

Your intuition is right: it goes back to ASCII. ASCII is really a simple 1:1 mapping from letters (which make sense in human language) to integer values (that can be worked with by hardware); for every letter there is an unique integer. For example, the 'letter' CTRL-A is represented by the decimal number '1'. (For historical reasons, lots of control characters came first - so CTRL-G, which rand the bell on an old teletype terminal, is ASCII code 7. Upper-case 'A' and the 25 remaining UC letters start at 65, and so on. See http://www.asciitable.com/ for a full list.)

C lets you 'coerce' variables into other types. In other words, the compiler cares about (1) the size, in memory, of the var (see 'pointer arithmetic' in K&R), and (2) what operations you can do on it.

If memory serves me right, you can't do arithmetic on a char. But, if you call it an int, you can. So, to convert all LC letters to UC, you can do something like:

char letter;
....
if(letter-is-upper-case) {
    letter = (int) letter - 32;
}

Some (or most) C compilers would complain if you did not reinterpret the var as an int before adding/subtracting.

but, in the end, the type 'char' is just another term for int, really, since ASCII assigns a unique integer for each letter.