Why does right shifting negative numbers in C bring 1 on the left-most bits? [duplicate]

Question

The book "C The Complete Reference" by Herbert Schildt says that "(In the case of a signed, negative integer, a right shift will cause a 1 to be brought in so that the sign bit is preserved.)"

What's the point of preserving the sign bit?

Moreover, I think that the book is referring to the case when negative numbers are represented using a sign bit and not using two's complement. But still even in that case the reasoning doesn't seem to make any sense.

Answer 1

The Schildt book is widely acknowledged to be exceptionally poor.

In fact, C doesn't guarantee that a 1 will be shifted in when you right-shift a negative signed number; the result of right-shifting a negative value is implementation-defined.

However, if right-shift of a negative number is defined to shift in 1s to the highest bit positions, then on a 2s complement representation it will behave as an arithmetic shift - the result of right-shifting by N will be the same as dividing by 2^N, rounding toward negative infinity.

Answer 2

The statement is sweeping and inaccurate, like many a statement by Mr Schildt. Many people recommend throwing his books away. (Amongst other places, see The Annotated Annotated C Standard, and ACCU Reviews — do an author search on Schildt; see also the Definitive List of C Books on Stack Overflow).

It is implementation defined whether right shifting a negative (necessarily signed) integer shifts zeros or ones into the high order bits. The underlying CPUs (for instance, ARM; see also this class) often have two different underlying instructions — ASR or arithmetic shift right and LSR or logical shift right, of which ASR preserves the sign bit and LSR does not. The compiler writer is allowed to choose either, and may do so for reasons of compatibility, speed or whimsy.

ISO/IEC 9899:2011 §6.5.7 Bitwise shift operators

¶5 The result of E1 >> E2is E1 right-shifted E2 bit positions. If E1 has an unsigned type or if E1 has a signed type and a nonnegative value, the value of the result is the integral part of the quotient of E1 / 2^E2. If E1 has a signed type and a negative value, the resulting value is implementation-defined.