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

(www.open-std.org)

288 points Twirrim | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 22:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source

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Suzuran ◴[18 Oct 24 12:33 UTC] No.41878818[source]▶

Just mandate that everything must be run on an Intel or ARM chip and be done with it. Stop pretending anything else is viable.

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AnimalMuppet ◴[18 Oct 24 12:39 UTC] No.41878862[source]▶

>>41878818 #

C++ is the second-most-widely-available language (behind C). Many other things are viable. Everything from a Z15 IBM mainframe to almost every embedded chip in existence. ("Viable" meaning "still being produced and used in volume, and still being used in new designs".)

The next novel chip design is going to have a C++ compiler too. No, we don't yet know what its architecture will be.

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1. Suzuran ◴[18 Oct 24 13:51 UTC] No.41879474[source]▶

>>41878862 #

Oh, but we do know - In order to be compatible with the existent languages, it's going to have to look similar to what we have now. It will have to keep 8 bit bytes instead of going wider that's what IBM came up with in the 1950s, and it will have to be a stack-oriented machine that looks like a VAX so it can run C programs. Unicode will always be a second-class character set behind ASCII because it has to look like it runs Unix, and we will always use IEEE floating point with all its inaccuracy because using scaling decimal data types just makes too much sense and we can't have that.

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