title: C encoding of character constants
body: <p>My programmer's instinct would say that a character constant in c (eg: 'x') is encoded using the machine character set from the machine on which it is compiled. However, the following exerpt is from "The C Programming Language: ANSI C Edition"</p>
  
  <p>"A character constant is a sequence of one or more characters enclosed in single quotes, as in 'x'. The value of a character constant with only one character is the numeric value of the charachter in the machine's character set at execution time."</p>
  
  <p>Emphasis on the last 3 words.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone explain why they would say "at execution time". Surely the character value is encoded in the compiled binary (or ELF, A.OUT...) ?</p>
  
  <p>I was wondering, but couldn't come up with any logical explanaition for this, surely K &amp; R knew what they were doing!</p>