C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

155 points · Twirrim · 5 hours ago

166 comments

favorited · 3 hours ago

Previously, in JF's "Can we acknowledge that every real computer works this way?" series: "Signed Integers are Two’s Complement" <https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p09...>

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pjdesno · 3 hours ago

During an internship in 1986 I wrote C code for a machine with 10-bit bytes, the BBN C/70. It was a horrible experience, and the existence of the machine in the first place was due to a cosmic accident of the negative kind.

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WalterBright · 2 hours ago

D made a great leap forward with the following:

1. bytes are 8 bits

2. shorts are 16 bits

3. ints are 32 bits

4. longs are 64 bits

5. arithmetic is 2's complement

6. IEEE floating point

and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!

Oh, and Unicode was the character set. Not EBCDIC, RADIX-50, etc.

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MaulingMonkey · 3 hours ago

Some people are still dealing with DSPs.

https://thephd.dev/conformance-should-mean-something-fputc-a...

Me? I just dabble with documenting an unimplemented "50% more bits per byte than the competition!" 12-bit fantasy console of my own invention - replete with inventions such as "UTF-12" - for shits and giggles.

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harry8 · 3 hours ago

Is C++ capable of deprecating or simplifying anything?

Honest question, haven't followed closely. rand() is broken,I;m told unfixable and last I heard still wasn't deprecated.

Is this proposal a test? "Can we even drop support for a solution to a problem literally nobody has?"

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