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

[Gregory Ewing]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> Certainly not. A byte would be 21 bits!

Only if 21 bits were *also* an addressable unit of storage
in addition to octets. That would be an interesting architecture
indeed.

If you really wanted that, it might be easier just to make
the memory bit-addressable. In which case a char would be
1 bit!

I believe Burroughs built a bit-addressable machine at
one point. It was meant to be user-microprogrammable,
so you designed an instruction set for what you wanted
to do, and then programmed in that.

-- 
Greg