Why was the boolean data type not implemented in C

Question

One of my friends asked a question, why is there no Boolean data type in the C programming language. I did a bit of searching and reading. I got few questions and answers in stack overflow saying that,

1. All data types should be addressable, and a bit cannot be addressed.
2. The basic data structure at the hardware level of mainstream CPUs is a byte. Operating on bits in these CPUs require additional processing.

We can use a bool in this manner

#define bool int
#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 0

or use typedefs.

But my question is this: why wasn't it implemented as a data type in C, even after so many years. doesn't it make sense to implement a one byte data type to store a boolean value rather than using int or short explicitly.

Answer 1

That's not true any more. The built-in boolean type, aka _Bool is available since C99. If you include stdbool.h, its alias bool is also there for you.

---

_Bool is a true native type, not an alias of int. As for its size, the standard only specifies it's large enough to store 0 and 1. But in practice, most compilers do make its size 1:

For example, this code snippet on ideone outputs 1:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
int main(void) {
    bool b = true;
    printf("size of b: %zu\n", sizeof(b));
    return 0;
}