Data Types and Sizes

There are four basic data types in C. Their meaning, and their size) are as follows:

Type	Meaning	Size (bytes)	Size (bits)
`char`	a single byte, capable of holding one character	1 byte	8 bits
`int`	an integer	4 bytes	32 bits
`float`	single-precision floating point number	4 bytes	32 bits
`double`	double-precision floating point number	8 bytes	64 bits

Binary representation

There are also qualifiers short, long, signed and unsigned, that can be applied to these basic types.

Qualifier	Size (bytes)	Size (bits)
`short int`	2 bytes	16 bits
`long int`	8 bytes	64 bits
`long double`	16 bytes	128 bits

We have been talking about variable types and how many bytes they take up in memory. An important quantity to know about is that one byte is made up of 8 bits. One bit can take on two possible values: 0 or 1. An unsigned 8-bit variable can take on values between 0 and (2⁸)-1 = 255. A signed 8-bit variable can take on values between -128 to 127.

So when a variable is signed, it can take on negative values, and half of its total range is spread below zero, and the other half above zero.

A signed int can take on values between -2,147,483,648 and +2,147,483,647. If we want to be able to represent integers larger than +2,147,483,647, then we can either use more bits (e.g., by using a long int), or by forcing all 32 bits of our int to be used on the positive side of zero. An unsigned int (4 bytes or 32 bits) can take on values between 0 and 4,294,967,295.

How many bytes on your machine?

Execute the following code that will print out the size of some basic C types.