Well, char has two semantic meanings. Either as a raw byte, or as an ASCII value. Both are represented as unsigned values (at least conceptually), so making the

Well, char has two semantic meanings. Either as a raw byte, or as an ASCII value. Both are represented as unsigned values (at least conceptually), so making them unsigned-by-default is fairly reasonable. Integers in mathematics and common usage are signed, so making them signed-by-default is also fairly reasonable. But if you think of char as a typedef [u]int8_t, then I do get the consistency argument.