Why are C character literals ints instead of chars?

Question

In C++, sizeof(\'a\') == sizeof(char) == 1. This makes intuitive sense, since \'a\' is a character literal, and sizeof(char) == 1 as d

Answer 1

I don't know, but I'm going to guess it was easier to implement it that way and it didn't really matter. It wasn't until C++ when the type could determine which function would get called that it needed to be fixed.