Why delimiter on char? c-based

Question

I was writing some code in C# the other day and it got me thinking. If a char literal can only have 1 char (or a delimited character) then why do we need the closing delimiter?

For example, currently we need to write:

char character = 's';

And there is no circumstance where this can work (obviously):

char character = 'sa';

Then why do we have to put the closing ' rather than have it implied? Eg:

char character = 's;
char anotherCharacter = '\';

Readability would only be impacted because we are used to the current standard (not necessarily because this way is less readable).

Answer 1

1. It's a convention
2. Characters are not necessarily represented in one character, in this unicode world
3. Control / escape sequences can be longer than one character (e.g. '\0x1a' )

Answer 2

In C#, Java and C++ the answer is simple:

Because that's the way it was implemented in C.

Why was it implemented in C that way?

Who knows? There may be some implementation quirk in the first C parser/compiler that made this choice obvious; I'm betting that K&R just didn't think about it. A single quote just looks weird.