As a C programmer who hangs out in comp.lang.c, I'm strongly tempted to get out a copy of C99 so that I can tell you precisely where you're wrong there. But I'll content myself with pointing out that there is no guarantee that sizeof(long)==2*sizeof(short)==4*sizeof(char), and moreover that even if that did hold, there is still no guarantee that sizeof(struct {short hi; short lo;})==2*sizeof(short) because the struct might have padding - what if 'short' were a 16 bit quantity but stored in 32 bit words (perhaps because the arch can only do 32 bit writes, and has decided that short should be an int_fast16_t rather than an int_least16_t), resulting in alignment requirements?

In conclusion, PK should learn some basic C, and forget about the ++. (Old joke: what does C++ mean? Take C, add to it, then use the old version)

EDIT: thanks, paper-machine, and I approve of Markdown's choice of escape character. Now, if it'll just let me use \033[1;35m to change the colour...