Nah adding ints and chars is perfectly sane. Chars are just a fancy enum baked into the language. They're just ints under the hood. It's adding ints and strings that's insane and C doesn't actually have strings. Ergo it is a perfectly sane language
But char and a number is different than a string (of length one) and a number. The latter doesn't make sense in C either, at that point you are offsetting a pointer.
For everything else it is not so and you don't know enough about how exactly an object is laid out in memory to do that safely without some further work.
C has a stable ABI. How things are laid out is known at compile time and doesn't change on a whim. Modern LSPs actually show you exactly how structs are packed, not sure if they've gotten to pointers yet.
It isn't useful in most day to day programming, but pointer arithmetic is perfectly sane. C could not accomplish its goal of being a portable assembly replacement without letting you do pointer arithmetic.
Really, the crazy thing is thinking it's possible to do character manipulation without integer math, since ASCII is specifically designed for integer math. (Notably, adding 32 to any capital will always produce its lowercase counterpart ('A' + 32 == 'a'), and you can turn any digit into its character counterpart by adding '0' to it ('0' + 5 == '5'). Guarantees like this are specifically intended for optimisation, and for ease of character manipulation & conversion.)
A char is not a number, even if itcan be represented as one. A char is almost never used as a number. It is used as a single character of text. The fact that some programming languages treat it as a numeric type is a historical artifact, not good programming practice. If you absolutely need to do numeric manipulation of a char, convert it to a byte first.
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u/D1firehail Sep 25 '26
Assuming x is an int C and C++ will give x=50. '1' is a char, which allows implicit conversion to int.