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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: 0s | source
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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.

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gerdesj ◴[18 Oct 24 01:10 UTC] No.41875486[source]▶
"1. bytes are 8 bits"

How big is a bit?

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1. thamer ◴[18 Oct 24 02:06 UTC] No.41875768[source]▶
This doesn't feel like a serious question, but in case this is still a mystery to you… the name bit is a portmanteau of binary digit, and as indicated by the word "binary", there are only two possible digits that can be used as values for a bit: 0 and 1.