• she/they
  1. enby. Retrotech. Demoscene. Programming. Drum & Bass DJ. Amiga Junglist. Autistic. Trans. Adult by circumstance, not by choice.


lynndrumm
@lynndrumm

I'm not saying computer standards aren't still a mess right now, but 60-70 years ago we didn't even agree on how many bits a byte was so things could be worse


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

it could be any number of bits less than (or equal to?) 36



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in reply to @lynndrumm's post:

I read a specification from a customer just last week where all memory sizes where explicitly given in "Ko" (Kilo-octects) and "Mo" (Mega-octects)

Which is admittedly clearer than just writing "B" when dealing with raw flash/RAM/EEPROM chips, where it's still customary to specify sizes in bits rather than bytes for who knows whatever reason

This is, AFAIK, the way the French always write it. “B” and “b” for them both mean “bits”, which can accidentally cause an increase in confusion when a French speaker writes “32 KB” meaning “32 kilobits”, and an English speaker reads “32 kilobytes” because of the capitalization.

Oh absolutely! B/b is a classic example of that special sort of cheeky-clever that tech people love to employ to the confusion of everyone else. There's a reason the symbol for “miles” is “mi”, not “M”. (“Because M is bigger than m! Ho ho ho, we're so smart!”) I Hate it.

in reply to @DiscoDeerDiary's post:

This is still true in C. A byte (char) has to be at least 8 bits but can be longer. As far as I'm aware, it's totally fine for an implementation to define most of the int-ish types to be 32 bits.

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

I cannot stress enough how actually amazing this is. Working with a system that has direct support for loading and storing groups of bits that aren't 8 makes dealing with lots of low level stuff like crypto or many types of compression a piece of cake. It makes everything else feel like shit.