alt Hacker NewsA lot of this stems from trying to insist that char just means "small" and not "8 bits" and that int means "bigger than that" and not "32 bits". In fairness, K&R dealt with an era where 9 bit architectures existed, but char is 8 bits now. Everywhere.
In the world of microcontrollers, CHAR_BIT can be 16 or some other funky number. char is usually 8 bits in size, though.