11.1.3 Narrow Integers

The types that are narrower than int are rarely used for ordinary variables—we declare them int instead. This is because C converts those narrower types to int for any arithmetic. There is literally no reason to declare a local variable char, for instance.

In particular, if the value is really a character, you should declare the variable int. Not char! Using that narrow type can force the compiler to truncate values for conversion, which is a waste. Furthermore, some functions return either a character value, or -1 for “no character.” Using int makes it possible to distinguish -1 from a character by sign.

The narrow integer types are useful as parts of other objects, such as arrays and structures. Compare these array declarations, whose sizes on 32-bit processors are shown:

signed char ac[1000];   /* 1000 bytes */
short as[1000];         /* 2000 bytes */
int ai[1000];           /* 4000 bytes */
long long all[1000];    /* 8000 bytes */

In addition, character strings must be made up of chars, because that’s what all the standard library string functions expect. Thus, array ac could be used as a character string, but the others could not be.