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

(www.open-std.org)
216 points Twirrim | 3 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. basementcat ◴[18 Oct 24 03:41 UTC] No.41876149[source]▶
A bit is a measure of information theoretical entropy. Specifically, one bit has been defined as the uncertainty of the outcome of a single fair coin flip. A single less than fair coin would have less than one bit of entropy; a coin that always lands heads up has zero bits, n fair coins have n bits of entropy and so on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

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2. fourier54 ◴[18 Oct 24 04:04 UTC] No.41876245[source]▶
That is a bit in information theory. It has nothing to do with the computer/digital engineering term being discussed here.
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3. sirsinsalot ◴[18 Oct 24 05:00 UTC] No.41876484[source]▶
This comment I feel sure would repulse Shannon in the deepest way. A (digital, stored) bit, abstractly seeks to encode and make useful through computation the properties of information theory.

Your comment must be sarcasm or satire, surely.