16 Sep 2007 aleix   » (Journeyer)

Integer comparisons

This may be something basic, but I lost a bit of time last week trying to find a bug at work, so I thought it was worth mentioning it.

When comparing signed and unsigned expressions of the same size, the compiler produces what it might be unexpected results. Suppose you have this code:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{
  unsigned short int a = -12;
  signed short int b = -12;

  printf ("%s\n", (a == b) ? "OK" : "failed");

  return 0;
}

Here, you would probably expect an “OK” output, but surprisingly you get “failed“. Why is this? If you know about integer promotion, you may skip to the end if you don’t want to follow all the process.

Fortunately, I received a copy of K&R last week, so I started digging into the issue to try to understand why this was happening.

About equality operators, K&R section A7.10 reads

The equality operators follow the same rules as the relational operators…

Section A7.9, about relational operator, reads

The usual arithmetic conversions are performed on arithmetic operands…

So, how these arithmetic conversions work?

This is also clearly explained in K&R section A6.5 (the same rules apply to the C99 standard, section 6.3.1.8, Usual arithmetic conversions). The part that interests us is after having evaluated all the real type conversions, when it says

Otherwise, the integer promotions are performed on both operands…

So, before performing the comparison of our operands, both undergo integer promotion. Integer promotion (K&R, section A6.2) says that

If an int can represent all the values of the original type, then the value is converted to int; otherwise the value is converted to unsigned int.

An int can represent all the values of our operands, so after the integer promotion is performed, both operands have int type. Having a look back to our operands, we know that the a variable holds the value 0xFFF4, and after applying the integer promotion, it maintains the value. The same happens with variable b, that holds 0xFFFFFFF4 to represent -12. Clearly, both values are different and the check fails.

At the end of K&R section A6.5 this is explicitly explained

The new rules are slightly more complicated, but reduce somewhat the suprises that may occur when an unsigned quantity meets signed. Unexpected results may still occur whan an unsigned expression is compared to a signed expression of the same size.

Note, that this issue does not occur with 32-bit values, as both operands would be “0xFFFFFFF4″.

So, be careful when comparing unsigned and signed types.

Syndicated 2007-09-16 17:33:32 from axelio

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