SQL Conversion (VARCHAR2 and CHAR) in ORACLE 7

Hi:

   I'm having a little problem here and perhaps somebody can help me.    I'm trying to do a join between 2 tables which should have the same keys in the CODE column, but one is a CHAR column and the other is a VARCHAR2 (anybody knows why). Both of them are of length 5, and the keys are of length 4 (they are supposed to grow, so we need length 5), so in the CHAR column they have a blank-pad of one character and this makes the problem.

   What I'm trying to do is to change the first table CODE column to a VARCHAR2, but I couldn't manage to do it. I have ORACLE 7, does anybody know how can I do this?.

P.S.: I tried a
 insert into final_table
 select *
 from initial_table;

where:
final_table is the table with CODE as VARCHAR2 and initial_table is the table with CODE as CHAR, to see if ORACLE made a implicit conversion, but it does not.

                     Thanks

                                      Alvaro

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