P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte

I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.

This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as "bytes." These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++... and whether modern C++ cares about them.

4 comments

I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.
This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as "bytes." These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++... and whether modern C++ cares about them.
I knew it! I always had this gut feeling that a byte has 8 bits. /s
I can see this being a breaking change for some strange edge cases and (ab)uses.
- Parity bit