On Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:49:47 -0400, Ellery Newcomer <ellery-newcomer at utulsa.edu> wrote: > can someone remind why the resulting type is int? > > is it a "c does it" thing? Yes, but it should be reassignable to a byte via range propogation. With C, there was no range propogation, so int & int was also assignable to char. -Steve