C++: Specifiers / Literal Prefix & Suffix

Specifiers

Specifiers modify the meanings of the basic built-in types and expand them to a much larger set. There are four specifiers:

• long
• short
• signed
• unsigned

The size hierarchy for floating point numbers is: float, double, and long double. “long float” is not a legal type. There are no short floating-point numbers.

When you are modifying an int with short or long, the keyword int is optional.

Literal Prefix & Suffix

Character & String Literals

Prefix	Meaning	Type	Example
u	utf-16	char16_t	u'x'
U	utf-32	char32_t	U'x'
L	wide character	wchar_t	L"wide string"
u8	utf-8 (string literal only)	char	u8"I'm a UTF-8 string."

Integer Literals

Suffix	Type	Example
u or U	unsigned	12U
l or L	long	12L / 12UL / 12LU
ll or LL	long long	12LL / 12ULL / 12LLU

The minus sign, e.g. in -47, is not part of the literal. It is an operator that negates the value of its (literal) operand.

Float-Point Literals

Suffix	Type
f or F	float
l or L	long double