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What's a "women"?
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I always though a word was twice as many bits as a byte. Hence in Windows typedefs WORD = 16 bits.
Nope, that's just a hangover from 16-bit versions of Windows.
I hate windows typedefs.
I hate window pelmets
small b is a bit, large B is a byte.
Not sure why they picked 4 bits to a byte, I think it was to do with the size of the MC instruction sets
The 8 bit byte was introduced by IBM with the 360 architecture.
FWIW.
who cares about bytes and words, it's all about nibbles and more importantly: meganibbles.
Nibbles are good, MegaNibbles even better... I'm not so hot on the middle ground though, the KilaNibble has always filled me with dread personally!
If so, then what's a word?
A Word is as long or as short as its needed to be. It can be 8 bits, or 16 bits, or it could be 1 bit, 39 bits, 427 bits, or however long it needs to be to represent a large enough number as is required. AFAIK, the 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits that we have become familiar with is purely because those are the convenient sizes that were determined by Microsoft/Apple/Intel/AMD etc for their computers and operating systems. You can of course represent any number with a word larger than is required, it will just begin with a lot of zeroes... For instance, if you wanted to represent the number 4 with a 64 bit word, it is just going to start with 61 zeroes which is kind of redundant...