Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 4:28 PM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Grant Edwards wrote:
>>
>> On 2017-10-13, Stefan Ram <ram at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>
>>>      1 byte
>>>
>>>      addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold
>>>      any member of the basic character set of the execution
>>>      environment«
>>>
>>>    ISO C standard
>
>
> Hmmm. So an architecture with memory addressed in octets
> and Unicode as the basic character set would have a
> char of 8 bits and a byte of 32 bits?
>
> Not only does "byte" not always mean "8 bits", but
> "char" isn't always short for "character"...

Certainly not. A byte would be 21 bits!

Seriously though, I don't think anyone would design hardware like
this. But I'd love to see what happens.

ChrisA