On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 01:32:02PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: [...] > Why is byte-granularity in addressing a necessity?
Because C's strings are broken by design and require one to be able to form a pointer to individual characters. > It's only an issue if you have instructions that operate directly on byte > quantities in memory. One wheeze is to just declare that bytes are the same size as a machine word. C doesn't require char to be exactly 8 bits, but merely at least 8 bits. However, a lot of C code will break if char, short, int and long aren't exactly the same size as they are on x86. Mind you, a lot of it is still broken even if they are...
