Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/05/13/11:44:44
On Thu, 13 May 1999, Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia wrote:
> >> Like 'char' is always 1 byte.
> >
> >That's not true, either. There are compilers (mostly for embedded
> >systems) where `char' is 32-bit wide.
>
> Then a byte is defined as 32 bits on those systems.
AFAIK, there's no such thing as a `byte' in the C language description.
So defining a byte as 32 bits doesn't help for the issue at hand which
had to do with portability of C programs.
Most people think that byte is a synonym for 8 bits.
> The
> exact definition of byte, for every system, is the minimum addressable
> memory unit.
I'm not against this definition, but I'm not sure it's true. A compiler
for embedded system could disallow 8-bit bytes because that would produce
inefficient code, not because individual bytes aren't addressable.
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