On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 06:51 am, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: > On Saturday, August 20, 2016 at 6:03:53 AM UTC+12, Terry Reedy wrote: >> >> An 'octet' is a byte of 8 bits. > > Is there any other size of byte?
Depends what you mean by "byte", but the short answer is "Yes". In the C/C++ standard, bytes must be at least eight bytes. As the below FAQ explains, that means that on machines like the PDP-10 a C++ compiler will define bytes to be 32 bits. One common definition of "byte" is the smallest addressable unit of memory. On that basis, there have been machines like the Control Data 6600 where a byte was 60 bits. Honeywell machines used 9 bits. Digital signal processes (DSPs) frequently have bytes with more than eight bits, such as Texas Instruments C54x DSPs (16 bit bytes), BelaSigna DSPs (24 bits) and DSP56K/Symphony Audio DSPs (24 bits). The Saturn CPU (used in the HP-48SX/GX calculator line) addresses memory 4-bit bytes. Windows CE took the unusual, and non-conformant, approach of running on hardware with 16 bit bytes and simply not defining "char" (and presumably "byte") in their C compiler. See: https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/intrinsic-types http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5516044/system-where-1-byte-8-bit http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2098149/what-platforms-have-something-other-than-8-bit-char http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/120126/what-is-the-history-of-why-bytes-are-eight-bits -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
