On 14/11/2013 23:02, Quoth Jonathan Wakely:
0xffffffff does not explicitly specify a size so the compiler is allowed to pick one itself; it will probably infer "unsigned int", as "signed int" is too small. (Or on platforms where "int" is 16-bit, it would infer "unsigned long".)
The compiler doesn't get to pick, again Table 6 says what its type is.
That counts as the compiler picking the type, because on different platforms a different result occurs, and it has a wider range to choose from without the suffix. As I said, on 16-bit platforms it would pick "unsigned long" and on 32-bit platforms it would pick "unsigned int".
(Technically that usage should ideally require reinterpret_cast instead of static_cast, since you're reinterpreting the sign bit. But again I think tradition won out here -- and it's a less scary conversion than other places you need reinterpret_cast.)
No, reinterpret_cast between different integer types is ill-formed. Only the conversions listed in [expr.reinterpret.cast] are allowed.
I know that, that wasn't my point. I wasn't saying that reinterpret_cast is valid according to the standard, I was saying that the internalised meaning of reinterpret_cast in most people's heads ("interpret the underlying raw bit storage of this variable as this other type") is closer in behaviour to what static_cast on a same-size integer type actually does (at least in most implementations), vs. what static_cast does when performing any other conversion (eg. integer to float alters the bit pattern, pointer to other pointer might return a different pointer value, etc). I'm not even saying that this is wrong -- part of the reason to make the cast types explicit over the C-style casts was to more clearly call out the places where you're doing "scary" things (aka reinterpret_cast), to enhance type safety and stamp out void* -- and integer conversions aren't sufficiently scary (although arguably they're still something you need to pay almost as much attention to -- while they're less likely to crash or UB if used wrong than bad pointer casts, they can still produce incorrect results). (And I might be wrong about this [as I haven't looked at C++11 changes in detail] but IIRC the standard does not actually guarantee that ints are in two's-complement form, so the integer static_cast might not be reversible, although I think a lot of code assumes it is.)