Should you be able to initialize a float with a char?

[max haughton]

For example:

float x = 'a';

Currently compiles. I had no idea that it does but I was 
implementing this pattern in SDC and lo and behold it does (and 
thus sdc has to support it).

Should it? Implicit conversions and implicit-anything around 
floats seem to be very undocumented in the specification too.