Richard Martin writes:
On Apr 10, 6:57pm, jim bell wrote:
At 06:29 PM 4/10/96 -0700, Simon Spero wrote:
No, bytes are no always 8 bits - some machines use(d) 9-bit bytes. I notice you gave no examples. Why is that? Perhaps he thought that most people who were interested could go look it up themselves.
- From a really quick web search, we find that the SGI Impact jams 9-bit bytes [that's what it says] across the Rambus internally. I'm not sure if the memory itself is 9-bit.
[I told myself I was going to stay out of this, but Jim Bell's dogmatic stance irks me... ] Here's a citation from "Portability of C Programs and the Unix System" by S.C. Johnson and D.M. Ritchie (yes, that Richie) in the Bell System Technical Journal volume 57, Number 6, July-August 1978. "A representation of characters (bytes) must be provided with at least 8 bits per byte. ... Most programs make no explicit use of this fact, but the I/O system uses it heavily. (This tends to rule out one plausible representation of characters on the DEC PDP-10, which is able to access 5 7-bit characters in a 36-bit word with one bit left over. Fortunately, that machine can access four 9-bit characters equally well.) ..." The clear implication is that "byte" means the number of bits used or needed to represent a single character. -- Jeff