Can a int value added to a float value? - c

Question

/**Program for internal typecasting of the compiler**/
#include<stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
float b = 0;
// The Second operand is a integer value which gets added to first operand
// which is of float type. Will the second operand be typecasted to float?
b = (float)15/2 + 15/2;
printf("b is %f\n",b);
return 0;
}
OUTPUT : b is 14.500000

Answer 1

Yes, an integral value can be added to a float value.
The basic math operations (+, -, *, /), when given an operand of type float and int, the int is converted to float first.
So 15.0f + 2 will convert 2 to float (i.e. to 2.0f) and the result is 17.0f.
In your expression (float)15/2 + 15/2, since / has higher precedence than +, the effect will the same as computing ((float)15/2) + (15/2).
(float)15/2 explicitly converts 15 to float and therefore implicitly converts 2 to float, yielding the final result of division as 7.5f.
However, 15/2 does an integer division, so produces the result 7 (there is no implicit conversion to float here).
Since (float)15/2 has been computed as a float, the value 7 is then converted to float before addition. The result will therefore be 14.5f.
Note: floating point types are also characterised by finite precision and rounding error that affects operations. I've ignored that in the above (and it is unlikely to have a notable effect with the particular example anyway).
Note 2: Old versions of C (before the C89/90 standard) actually converted float operands to double in expressions (and therefore had to convert values of type double back to float, when storing the result in a variable of type float). Thankfully the C89/90 standard fixed that.

Answer 2

Rule of thumb: When doing an arithmetic calculation between two different built-in types, the "smaller" type will be converted into the "larger" type.
double > float > long long(C99) > long > short > char.
b = (float)15/2 + 15/2;
Here the first part, (float)15/2 is equivalent to 15.0f / 2. Because an operation involving a "larger" type and a "smaller" type will yield a result in the "larger" type, (float)15/2 is 7.500000, or 7.5f.
When it comes to 15/2, since both operands are integers, the operation is done only on integer level. Therefore the decimal point is stripped (from int), and only gives 7 as a result.
So the expression is calculated into
b = 7.5f + 7;
No doubt you'll have 14.500000 as the final result, because it's exactly 14.5f.

Answer 3

b = (float)15/2 + 15/2;
The first one((float)15/2) will work fine. The second one will also work but will be converted into an integer first, so you will lose precision. Like:
b = (float)15/2 + 15/2;
b = 7.500000f + 7
b = 14.500000

Answer 4

It's worth asking: if an integer value could not be added to floating-point value, what would the symptom be?
Compiler issues error or warning message.
Something gets truncated; you don't get the result you want.
Undefined behavior: you might or might not get the result you want, and the compiler might or might not warn you about it.
But in fact none of these things happen. When you add an integer to a floating-point value, the compiler automatically converts the integer to a floating-point value so it can do the addition that way, and this is perfectly well defined. For example, if you have the code
double d = 7.5;
int i = 7;
double result = d + i;
the compiler interprets this just as if you had written
double result = d + (double)i;
And it works this way for just about all operations: the same logic is applied when you subtract, multiply, or divide a floating-point value and an integer.
And it works this way for just about all types. If you add a long int and an int, the plain int automatically gets converted to a long.
As a general rule (and I really can't think of too many exceptions), the compiler always wants to do arithmetic on two values of the same type. So whenever you have two values of different type, the compiler will just about always convert one of them for you. The full set of rules for how it does this are rather elaborate, but they're all supposed to make sense, and do what you want. The full set of rules is called the usual arithmetic conversions, and if you do a Google search on that phrase you'll find lots of explanations.
One case that does not necessarily do what you want is when the two variables are not different types. In particular, if the two variables are both integers, and the operation you're doing is division, the compiler doesn't have to convert anything: it divides the integer by the integer, discarding any remainder, and gives you an integer result. So if you have
int i = 1;
int j = 2;
int k = i / j;
then k ends up containing 0. And if you have
double d = i / j;
then d ends up containing 0 also, because the compiler follows exactly the same rules when performing the division; it doesn't "peek outside" to see that it's going to need a floating-point result.
P.S. I said, "As a general rule, the compiler always wants to do arithmetic on two values of the same type", and I said I couldn't think of too many exceptions. But if you're curious, two exceptions are the << and >> operators. If you have x << y, where x is a long int and y is a plain int, the compiler does not have to convert y to a long int first.