[Icc-avr] history of c

[BobGardner at aol.com]

Is there a technical reason that char functions like putchar tend to  promote 
the chars to ints? putchar and getchar have 'always' had a return type  of 
int. Some of this 'tradition' has to do with a historical desire to make  
everything an integer so it will run fast on a pdp11 I guess, but if I make a  
mistake and return a char instead of an int, does something break? Does the  wrong 
half of the int get used as the return value if there is a size mismatch?  I 
can see how you can return a char in an int, but how do you return an int in a  
char? What gets returned? The hi byte or the lo byte?



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