←back to thread

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: 0s | source
Show context
WalterBright ◴[18 Oct 24 00:33 UTC] No.41875254[source]▶
D made a great leap forward with the following:

1. bytes are 8 bits

2. shorts are 16 bits

3. ints are 32 bits

4. longs are 64 bits

5. arithmetic is 2's complement

6. IEEE floating point

and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!

Oh, and Unicode was the character set. Not EBCDIC, RADIX-50, etc.

replies(3): >>41875486 #>>41875539 #>>41875878 #
gerdesj ◴[18 Oct 24 01:10 UTC] No.41875486[source]▶
"1. bytes are 8 bits"

How big is a bit?

replies(6): >>41875621 #>>41875701 #>>41875768 #>>41876060 #>>41876149 #>>41876238 #
poincaredisk ◴[18 Oct 24 01:41 UTC] No.41875621[source]▶
A bit is either a 0 or 1. A byte is the smallest addressable piece of memory in your architecture.
replies(2): >>41875706 #>>41875737 #
1. Nevermark ◴[18 Oct 24 02:00 UTC] No.41875737[source]▶
Which … if your heap always returns N bit aligned values, for some N … is there a name for that? The smallest heap addressable segment?