A trick question

[code]

short i, j;

i = -32768;
j = -i;

printf("%d", j);

[/code]

As some of you may have guessed by my previous post (about books), I'm
trying to learn C. Well, a friend of mine (who is a programmer) asked me
(who is not a programmer) what the output of this would be, and why. I
had no clue, so I ran it, and it printed -32768. I gave him my best guess (which was wrong):

1) a short maxes out at 32768, so it has no more room to hold the sign info. That's it for i, anyway. When you define j as -i, it's saying "here's some sign info, then look at i", not actually doing the math as -1 * i.

My second guess was:

2) There are little gremlins in my compiler changing signs of my
numbers around. Darn gremlins!

Okay, so that one was wrong too. :(

I have to say, I'm a little bothered by this. Why does it print -32768?

- Gio

--
AND NOW FOR A WORD (an IF blog):

http://giomancer.wordpress.com/
.

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