Behavior of cout << hex with uint8 and uint16

Question

I\'m noticing that cout << hex is giving me strange results, and I cannot find anywhere that answers why. What I am doing is simply assigning some values to

Answer 1

The other answers are correct about the reason. The simplest fix is:

cout << hex << +a << endl;

Demonstration: http://ideone.com/ZHHAHX

It works because operands undergo integer promotion.