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

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.

I mean practically speaking in C++ we have (it just hasn't made it to the standard):

1. char 8 bit

2. short 16 bit

3. int 32 bit

4. long long 64 bit

5. arithmetic is 2s complement

6. IEEE floating point (float is 32, double is 64 bit)

Along with other stuff like little endian, etc.

Some people just mistakenly think they can't rely on such stuff, because it isn't in the standard. But they forget that having an ISO standard comes on top of what most other languages have, which rely solely on the documentation.

I work every day with real-life systems where int can be 32 or 64 bits, long long can be 64 or 128 bits, long double can be 64 or 80 or 128 bits, some systems do not have IEEE 754 floating point (no denormals!) some are big endian and some are little endian. These things are not in the language standard because they are not standard in the real world.

Practically speaking, the language is the way it is, and has succeeded so well for so long, because it meets the requirements of its application.