Characters are implemented as integers

• The char type's internal representation is an integer and that integer is it's ASCII value. Since there are relatively few possible characters (a total of 128), the characters were assigned the values from 0 to 127. Integers in the range of 0 to 127 can be stored in 1 byte of space, so sizeof(char) is 1.
• We really would like to think of characters as letters, digits, punctuation marks, etc, and not as numbers.
• Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful to use the fact that the letter A is followed by the letter B, etc.