char signedness (was: What's a C expert?)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <4724 at alvin.mcnc.org> spl at mcnc.org.UUCP (Steve Lamont) writes:
-In article <25999 at amdcad.AMD.COM> tim at amd.com (Tim Olson) writes:
->Having the sign of chars be undefined allows the implementation to be as
->efficient as possible with respect to converting between chars and ints.
-Huh?  Are you telling us that the standard *allows* such a horrible
-thing?

It has to -- that's been a C language rule since way back (see K&R 1st
Edition, for example).