Are long-suffix and unsigned-suffix needed when declaring long literals in C++?

Question

I have some ancient memories of writing C code like:

long value = 0;

in the bad old Win16 days and ending up with value being

Answer 1

No this should not be required any more. The behavior you are describing, if visible in the program and not just the debugger, is a bug.

Answer 2

Since you are presuming a 32-bit compiler, you may not need L as you did when using a 16-bit compiler, but you could need LL, e.g.:

long long ll;
ll = 1<<32;

gcc -std=c99 warns "left shift count >= width of type." Instead, you'd want:

ll = 1LL<<32;

See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/8108658/782738, for C++11 and C99 standard references.

Answer 3

They are not required in the examples you gave. However, they may be needed in some somewhat recondite circumstances. For example, the following may produce different values:

sizeof(1)
sizeof(1L)

Answer 4

But this notation is required for wchar_t strings, like

L"I am a wchar_t string."

and for long long integers, too...

I guess this is something that should be removed, it isn't useful (the type is declared with its name and not with some suffix), but still supported in C++11.

Hm.