why printf behaves differently when we try to print character as a float and as a hexadecimal?

Question

I tried to print character as a float in printf and got output 0. What is the reason for this.
Also:

char c=\'z\';
printf(\"%f %X\",c,c);

Answer 1

To understand the floating point issue, consider reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating_point

As for hexadecimal, let me guess.. the output was something like... 99?

This is because of encodings.. the machine has to represent information in some format, and usually that format entails either giving meanings to certain bits in a number, or having a table of symbols to numbers, or both

Floating points are sometimes represented as a (sign,mantissa,exponent) triplet all packed in a 32 or 64 bit number - characters are sometimes represented in a format named ASCII, which establishes which number corresponds to each character you type