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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:06:50+00:00

I got this doubt while writing some code. Is ‘bool’ a basic datatype defined

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I got this doubt while writing some code. Is ‘bool’ a basic datatype defined in the C++ standard or is it some sort of extension provided by the compiler ? I got this doubt because Win32 has ‘BOOL’ which is nothing but a typedef of long. Also what happens if I do something like this:

int i = true;

Is it ‘always’ guaranteed that variable i will have value 1 or is it again depends on the compiler I am using ? Further for some Win32 APIs which accept BOOL as the parameter what happens if I pass bool variable?

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  1. bool is a fundamental datatype in C++. Converting true to an integer type will yield 1, and converting false will yield 0 (4.5/4 and 4.7/4). In C, until C99, there was no bool datatype, and people did stuff like

    enum bool {     false, true };

    So did the Windows API. Starting with C99, we have _Bool as a basic data type. Including stdbool.h will typedef #define that to bool and provide the constants true and false. They didn’t make bool a basic data-type (and thus a keyword) because of compatibility issues with existing code.

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