[ftvy]

I have seen this happen with pointers on the x86_64 arch and the comparison operator where they appear to be the same value in the lower 4 bytes but the upper 4 bytes are different.

I am not exactly certain, but what I think happens is that when you define your charType variable that the upper bytes in the word are still the same random data, so when you multiply without casting, it is treating the char as an int and multiplying the whole 4 bytes. When you cast, it probably just multiplies the lowest byte and carries if necessary. I am also not certain if the compiler would optimize to using a shift operation if one operand is a multiple of 2.

Again, not exactly certain if this is the case, but it's similar to what I've noticed.