MATLAB: Is there a way to do signed 16 bit integer math

Question

The following computation done in MATLAB:

a=int16(32558);
b=int16(-32333);
c=b-a;

Yields a c value of -32768.

In standard C programming, the same computation written as:

signed short a=32558,b=-32333,c;
c=b-a;

Yields a c value of 645.

How do I align MATLAB math operations with standard C integer math operations?

Answer 1

"... In standard C programming ..."

Well, sort of. Signed integer overflow behavior is not really defined in the C language. It is left up to the compiler to determine what happens for a particular implementation. Also there is the fact that binary operations in C (such as minus) with integers shorter than an int will first be converted to int to do the calculation (even if the shorter integer is unsigned). So your calculation above is actually done as follows assuming e.g. short is 16-bit and int is 32-bit:

signed short a=32558, b=-32333, c;
c = (signed short)( (int)b - (int)a );

So the subtraction is done with int's and there is no overflow for the result at the int level using the values you have above. The overflow actually occurs on the assignment, and that is where the particular compiler rules for this behavior come into play.

Now as it turns out, most platforms these days use 2's complement for integer representation and the C compilers choose to handle signed integer overflow by silently maintaining the same bit pattern of the operation result in a modulo sense, but this is not a requirement and it is not mandated that things work this way.

MATLAB truncates integer overflow operations, so yes there will be a mismatch. To get the same behavior at the MATLAB level, you would first need to convert all operands to single or double, do the operation, then modulo the result with an appropriate value depending on the bitsize of the intended target (int8 or int16 etc), and finally store that result in the integer variable. E.g.,

c = int16(mod(double(b)-double(a),32768));