> be wary of doing this -- unsigned char propogation is a *nightmare*
   > when it comes to writing code that does not generate warnings!
   
   promoting a char to an int is inherently less portable than promoting
   a char to an unsigned char.



i'm more talking about converting a program to use unsigned char... it's
quite horrible to avoid all the goddamn warnings that various compilers
spit out.  GCC is the most forgiving, actually...  sparcworks..  ugh.