John W. Temples wrote:

> The original poster was correct.

Hi John,

Thanks for your note John, and my apologies to the original poster if I was
presumptuous in my post -- I took it to mean that a 16-bit signed integer
can *only* take on the values of -32767 to +32767 inclusive, but with the C
programming language aside, the decimal range of a signed (2s compliment)
16-bit integer is actually -32768 to +32767.

There is one thing about <limits.h> from "The C Programming Language"
(second edition) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie that is confusing to
me (I'm not sure if that edition came out before the C90 standard):

"The values are acceptable minimum magnitudes; larger values may be used."

 .
  .
  .
INT_MAX  +32767
INT_MIN  -32767
  .
  .
  .

Does "larger values may be used" mean that the following is legal?:

     signed int Number = -32768;


Do these defined constants mean that you can't use the *full* range of a
16-bit signed number in S16 integer types in your C programs?
I honestly don't understand why they did not use -32768 for INT_MIN -- this
appears lazy to me. I must be missing something obvious.
Why are they not using the full range in the defined constants?



HI-TECH for example defines:

#define INT_MAX         32767           /* max for int */
#define INT_MIN         (int)-32768     /* min for int */


Does this mean that HI-TECH is not ANSI C compliant?


Thanks for any clarification. I appreciate your time.


Best regards,

Ken Pergola

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics