Why Are C Character Literals Integers, Not Characters?

Why C Character Literals Are Ints Not Chars

It is a peculiarity in the C programming language that character literals (such as 'a') are represented as integers rather than characters (as in C ). This behavior can be surprising to newcomers to C, as it seems counterintuitive.

The reason for this design decision lies in the evolution of C. In the early days of C, its predecessor K&R C, type promotion was not as prevalent and it was difficult to use character values without first promoting them to integers. By representing character literals as integers from the outset, this additional step could be eliminated.

Additionally, C supports multi-character constants, such as 'abcd', which require more than one byte to represent. By storing character literals as integers, C can accommodate these longer constants within its 4-byte integer size.

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