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C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

(www.open-std.org)
182 points Twirrim | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 22:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.357s | source
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donatj ◴[17 Oct 24 23:55 UTC] No.41875031[source]▶
So please do excuse my ignorance, but is there a "logic" related reason other than hardware cost limitations ala "8 was cheaper than 10 for the same number of memory addresses" that bytes are 8 bits instead of 10? Genuinely curious, as a high-level dev of twenty years, I don't know why 8 was selected.

To my naive eye, It seems like moving to 10 bits per byte would be both logical and make learning the trade just a little bit easier?

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1. knome ◴[18 Oct 24 00:26 UTC] No.41875204[source]▶
likely mostly as a concession to ASCII in the end. you used a typewriter to write into and receive terminal output from machines back in the day. terminals would use ASCII. there were machines with all sorts of smallest-addressable-sizes, but eight bit bytes align nicely with ASCII. makes strings easier. making strings easier makes programming easier. easier programming makes a machine more popular. once machines started standardizing on eight bit bytes, others followed. when they went to add more data, they kept the byte since code was written for bytes, and made their new registeres two bytes. then two of those. then two of those. so we're sitting at 64 bit registers on the backs of all that that came before.