Why must a short be converted to an int before arithmetic operations in C and C++?

Question

From the answers I got from this question, it appears that C++ inherited this requirement for conversion of short into int when performing arithmetic operations from C. May I pick your brains as to why this was introduced in C in the first place? Why not just do these operations as short?

For example (taken from dyp's suggestion in the comments):

short s = 1, t = 2 ;
auto  x = s + t ;

x will have type of int.

Answer 1

If we look at the Rationale for International Standard—Programming Languages—C in section 6.3.1.8 Usual arithmetic conversions it says (emphasis mine going forward):

The rules in the Standard for these conversions are slight modifications of those in K&R: the modifications accommodate the added types and the value preserving rules. Explicit license was added to perform calculations in a “wider” type than absolutely necessary, since this can sometimes produce smaller and faster code, not to mention the correct answer more often. Calculations can also be performed in a “narrower” type by the as if rule so long as the same end result is obtained. Explicit casting can always be used to obtain a value in a desired type

Section 6.3.1.8 from the draft C99 standard covers the Usual arithmetic conversions which is applied to operands of arithmetic expressions for example section 6.5.6 Additive operators says:

If both operands have arithmetic type, the usual arithmetic conversions are performed on them.

We find similar text in section 6.5.5 Multiplicative operators as well. In the case of a short operand, first the integer promotions are applied from section 6.3.1.1 Boolean, characters, and integers which says:

If an int can represent all values of the original type, the value is converted to an int; otherwise, it is converted to an unsigned int. These are called the integer promotions.⁴⁸⁾ All other types are unchanged by the integer promotions.

The discussion from section 6.3.1.1 of the Rationale or International Standard—Programming Languages—C on integer promotions is actually more interesting, I am going to selectively quote b/c it is too long to fully quote:

Implementations fell into two major camps which may be characterized as unsigned preserving and value preserving.

[...]

The unsigned preserving approach calls for promoting the two smaller unsigned types to unsigned int. This is a simple rule, and yields a type which is independent of execution environment.

The value preserving approach calls for promoting those types to signed int if that type can properly represent all the values of the original type, and otherwise for promoting those types to unsigned int. Thus, if the execution environment represents short as something smaller than int, unsigned short becomes int; otherwise it becomes unsigned int.

This can have some rather unexpected results in some cases as Inconsistent behaviour of implicit conversion between unsigned and bigger signed types demonstrates, there are plenty more examples like that. Although in most cases this results in the operations working as expected.