Is there no ANSI/ISO standard for Pascal?

The situations where promotion in 'C' occur are well defined. I know nothing about Pascal but I'll bet it does something similar.

Don't get the impression that the 'C' compiler just substitutes an int for a char whenever it feels like it - if you do this:

char a;

Then 'a' remains a char for the duration of the program. It's value may be promoted to another type if, for instance, it is passed to a function expecting another type, or when it is the operand of certain operators, or in some conditional statement where overflow is a possibility, etc, but 'a' itself will definitely remain a char. These situations are all ones where it is intuitively the right thing for the compiler to do - if it didn't you'd have a whole lot more people unable to understand why their programs don't just work.



Do you mean you can do this: (sorry, I'll have to do it in pseudo 'C'):
char a;
(int)a; //a is now an integer

or this:

char a;
int b;
b=(int)a; //The value of 'a' is cast to int and copied into b