Does C depend on ASCII?

[Alex Nishri]

Does anyone have any experience or comments about the dependability of
programs written in C on the ASCII character representation?  Could most
programs written in C be run on a different character representation
scheme?  What about the Unix system itself?

(For a completely different scheme consider EBCDIC.  The numerics collate
after the alphabetics.  So 'a' < '1' in EBCDIC.  Also EBCDIC has holes in
the alphabetic sequence.  Thus 'a' + 1 is equal to 'b', but 'i' +1 is not
equal to 'j'.  In fact 'i' + 8 equals 'j'.)

Alex Nishri
University of Toronto
 ... utcsstat!nishri