What is the history of why bytes are eight bits?
What were the historical forces at work, the tradeoffs to make, in deciding to use groups of eight bits as the fundamental unit? There were machines, once upon a time, using other word sizes. But t...
How does it matter if a character is 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit
Jul 23, 2012 · 2 Unicode is logically a 21-bit code. As modern computers don’t conveniently work with such units, there are various solutions: use 32 bits (4 bytes), wasting a lot of bits, especially if your …
How are negative signed values stored? - Software Engineering Stack ...
So it is easily interpreted as +1. Now take an example of a negative signed value - 1000 0000 which comes out to be -8. Okay, the computer can understand that it is a negative value because of the …
bit - Why are CPUs' datapaths multiple of 8? - Software Engineering ...
Apr 30, 2017 · Current and common processing units are 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc bit. Why are their datapath multiple of 8 ? Is this all linked to the fact that the industry has settled with a 8-bit byte ? …
What is the advantage of choosing ASCII encoding over UTF-8?
Perhaps you were thinking of ASCII which is 7-bit and a proper subset of UTF-8. I.e. any valid ASCII stream is also a valid UTF-8 stream. If you were thinking of 8-bit character sets, one very important …
Why should C++ uint8_t data not be printable?
Dec 1, 2024 · Why should this be so? For numbers < 128 decimal the sign bit will be zero. In an ASCII based system an eg "A" should be stored as decimal 65 = binary 0100 0001 for both signed and …
In C++, Why do bitwise operators convert 8 or 16 bit integers to 32 bit?
May 27, 2020 · Is there a logical reason why the integer is upgraded to 32+ bits? I was trying to make an 8bit mask, and found myself a bit disappointed that the upgrade will corrupt my equations. sizeof( …
cpu - Memory Alignment - Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Oct 6, 2022 · The missing piece here could be that some instruction sets actually allow you to specify an 8-bit byte address and because of their implementations aligned accesses are better Wikipedia …
Is using 64 bit integers (long long) faster than less bits ones?
Jun 6, 2020 · The desired 16-bit field then has to be masked off and possibly shifted into place within the destination register." So, if I just use long long (64 bit integers), will my code be faster than if I use …
history - Why is int in C in practice at least a 32 bit type today ...
Oct 23, 2023 · When 32-bit processors (Intel 386) and 32-operating systems (Linux, Windows NT) got popular, C compilers switched to 32-bit int. However, int did not change during the 32- to 64-bit …