This is sorcery!
Seriously, this is C at its finest
not really.
As far as I can see, the upcast to
unsigned
happens because the
byte
value is leftshifted by eight! That means it's multiplied by 2^8 = 256. As far as I can remember, just
unsigned
means
unsigned int
. Only this way, you're able to store the maximum result value of up to 65535.
This way, your first line means "increase a by the sum of k[0] and k[1]*2^8".
Pointer arithmetics work just like in Delphi: If you increase your
unsigned char
pointer by 12, it's now pointing at the next address 12 bytes "later". In case it had been a pointer to short, it would now have been moved by 24 bytes.
I still don't have the slightest clue what and why is actually happening in this code, but I guess I at least figured out those two lines
