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  Before we leave our discussion of C, let's look at the way C represents
  different data types. When you write a routine that shares data with a C
  program, you must know how the C compiler stores data in memory.

  The data types available in C can be divided into three general
  categories: integer types, floating-point types, and other types.

  .  Integer types, including char, int, short, and long, are stored with
     their low-order bytes first in the familiar "back-words" 8086 format.
     In 8086 C implementations, char is 1 byte in size, int and short are 2
     bytes, and long is 4 bytes. The integer data types may be specified as
     either signed or unsigned.

  .  In Microsoft C, representations of floating-point data types (float and
     double) are based on the IEEE standard for floating-point data
     representation used in the 8087 math coprocessor. With this
     representation, a float value is 4 bytes long and a double is 8 bytes
     long. Despite the difference in size, a simple relationship exists
     between float and double: You can convert a float to a double by
     appending 4 bytes of zeros.

  .  Other C data types include pointers and strings. Pointers are address
     values; near pointers are 2 bytes long and far pointers are 4 bytes
     long. Strings are defined as arrays of type char. However, all strings
     in C are stored as ASCIIZ strings; that is, as a string of bytes
     terminated with a single zero byte. In a C program, you must
     accommodate the extra byte when you declare a string. For example, you
     would reserve storage for 64 bytes of string data plus the terminating
     null byte like this:

     char s[65];

     In C, the value of the name s would be the address of the string data
     associated with it. A subroutine called with s as a parameter can
     obtain the value of s (the address of the string data) directly from
     the stack and access the string data by reference to this address.