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182 points Twirrim | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 22:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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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.

gerdesj ◴[18 Oct 24 01:10 UTC] No.41875486[source]▶

"1. bytes are 8 bits"

How big is a bit?

A bit is either a 0 or 1. A byte is the smallest addressable piece of memory in your architecture.

elromulous ◴[18 Oct 24 01:56 UTC] No.41875706[source]▶

Technically the smallest addressable piece of memory is a word.

1. asveikau ◴[18 Oct 24 03:05 UTC] No.41876026[source]▶

Depends on your definition of addressable.

Lots of CISC architectures allow memory accesses in various units even if they call general-purpose-register-sized quantities "word".

Iirc the C standard specifies that all memory can be accessed via char*.

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