Questions about char

Question

cout << (char('a'+1)=='b');
// outputs 1

Question 1: What does 'a'+1 mean?
I'm guessing that it's the next letter of the alphabet?

Question 2: Why do we need brackets around 'a'+1?
I don't often see brackets after other data types...

Question 3: Why do we need brackets around char('a'+1)=='b'?
Is this analogous to " " for string?

Question 4: Why isn't there a 'bool' in front of (char('a'+1)=='b'); ?
After all, 1 is a boolean expression...

Answer 1

1st Ans:the expression 'a'+1 is evaluated like this:
'a' is first promoted to int.it becomes 97 to which 1 is then added to give 98.

2nd Ans:the char() in char('a'+1) creates a temporary char variable.Please note that is not type casting.The expression is just meant to create a temporary char variable and then initializes it with the value 98 obtained above.To verify this,try running this code:cout<<('a'+1)<<char('a'+1);
And note the difference.

3rd Ans:we need the brackets around the expression in the 2nd ans since the operator << has a higher precedence than ==.Without those brackets,the entire expression would have been evaluated like this
(cout<<char('a'+1))=='b'; and this would be a terrible compiler error.

4th Ans:we don't need explicit casting to bool since equivalence operators (==,!=) when applied to built-in types,always return a bool