Why in the following code:
short a = 4;
char b = 2;
cout << sizeof(a/b);
sizeof(a/b) is 4? Why is not 2 as size of short?
1 Answers
It is 4 because the type of the expression a / b is int and not short.
Excerpt from the The C++ Programming Language book:
Before an arithmetic operation is performed, integral promotion is used to create ints out of shorter integer types.
So, now your (shorter integers) a and b operands are promoted to be of type int. Thus the whole a / b expression becomes int and the size of type int is likely to be 4 bytes on your machine.
The sizeof operator in your case returns the size of the type of the expression which is int, which is 4. The sizeof operator can return:
- the size of the type
- the size of the type of an expression
This type conversion is not called type casting but integral promotion.
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