At 11:34 AM 4/12/96 -0500, Doug Hughes wrote:
On Apr 12 at 8:07 jim bell wrote:
Are you sure they're not referring to 8 bits of data and a parity bit? In any case, please give the address to the list so that it can be checked out.
Come on, give it up already and admit you were wrong. At least 8 different people have cited examples of machines that supported non 8bit bytes. Your pride is getting the best of you.
Jim is unwilling to admit his errors, even in things he has little or no training in. (I remember him claiming at one point that he was not a programmer or did any coding for that matter. Why he continues to persist in such things I will not speculate on...) I have worked on a couple of machines (that are still in use today) that were non-standard bit sizes. Many of the legacy machines from the old mainframe days (about 20+ years ago) had non-standard bit sizes. (Which made communication between then an interesting mess.) The old Microdata PICK machines had a weird byte size, for example. Some of the old Vax machines had the same "difficulty".
If you mean 8 bits, you should really say Octets as has always been the form of Internet RFC's where the distinction is important.
Making the assumption as to the stability of the sizes of bytes, words, and characters can get you into alot of trouble in the coding world. Characters are a good case in point. Depending on your OS and/or language, you could be talking about 5, 7, 8 or more bits. With the need to distribute applications internationally, the need to support all sorts of character schemes makes it even more variable. Unicode is 16 bytes per character. Shift JIS can be variable. (Either 8 or 16, if I remember correctly.) It just depends on the hardware, software, and compiler being used. I am sure that alot of old code is getting broken by the assumption that a character is always 8 bits. Assuming the same about bytes on old machines will do about as much good.
It may be standard today, but it was not always so..
And the standards change. I expect that at some point, some standards group will change all the terms again. (And this argument will flare up again...) --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon