Nope, C on 36 bit machines traditionally used 9-bit chars, packed four per word. C tends to dislike (read disallow) representations where chars, as the primitiv

Nope, C on 36 bit machines traditionally used 9-bit chars, packed four per word. C tends to dislike (read disallow) representations where chars, as the primitive type, do not completely tile memory; it makes things like memcpy() fuzzy, as there are bits defined at the word level of the memory layout that are not included in any char, and thus not clear what copying semantics should be.