the preprocessor can reliably determine the signedness of wchar_t.
L'\0' is used for 0 in the expressions so that, if the underlying type
of wchar_t is long rather than int, the promoted type of the
expression will match the type of wchar_t.
per 7.18.4: Each invocation of one of these macros shall expand to an
integer constant expression suitable for use in #if preprocessing
directives. The type of the expression shall have the same type as
would an expression of the corresponding type converted according to
the integer promotions. The value of the expression shall be that of
the argument.
the key phrase is "converted according to the integer promotions".
thus there is no intent or allowance that the expression have
smaller-than-int types.
really wchar_t should never vary, but the ARM EABI defines it as an
unsigned 32-bit int instead of a signed one, and gcc follows this
nonsense. thus, to give a conformant environment, we have to follow
(otherwise L""[0] and L'\0' would be 0U rather than 0, but the
application would be unaware due to a mismatched definition for
WCHAR_MIN and WCHAR_MAX, and Bad Things could happen with respect to
signed/unsigned comparisons, promotions, etc.).
fortunately no rules are imposed by the C standard on the relationship
between wchar_t and wint_t, and WEOF has type wint_t, so we can still
make wint_t always-signed and use -1 for WEOF.
the basic idea is that the only things in alltypes.h should be types
that either vary from system to system (in practice, not just in
theoretical la-la land - this is the implementation so we choose what
constraints we want to impose on ports) or which are needed by
multiple system headers.
Rich Felker