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 keeps those values distinct.

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.