why different value for same char?

[Pokshun]

Can someone explain why this ( http://tinyurl.com/5qvo44 ) prints different values?

1) The character is non-English.. and it does not fit in base ASCII range.
2) There is overflow happening too

What I basically want to understand is why assigning a char and casting it to int gives a different value than just casting a raw char directly.

[drkybelk]

int and char have different sizes in terms of bytes on your architecture.
For example (in many machines these days) char has 1 byte and int has 4.
So implicitly casting Tau to a char will lose information. the value will be in the range -128 to 127.
when converting to an int the value will be in the range from -2^31 to 2^31-1

That's it.

N.B.
the real values depend on your architecture! Above is only an example

[Danny]

There's also another issue here: signed vs unsigned char. Without knowing which compiler and OS are being used, you can't tell whether plain char is signed or unsigned.

More specifically: the literal 'ע' (assume it's the Greek letter tau) stands for the numeric constant that is reserved for that letter. It may be larger than 8 bits. By contrast, initializing a char variable with 'ע' enforces truncation to 8-bits. Once the original numeric value has been truncated to 8 bits, you cannot expand it to its original value, so the cout expression that seeminly prints int merely prints the truncated value. Perhaps an example will illustrate this:

char s = 1000; //truncation 
cout <<(int) s<<endl; //you won't see 1000 here!
cout<<1000<<endl;