Am 25.02.19 um 19:44 schrieb G.W. Haywood via clamav-users: > Just as decimal strings are strings composed of decimal digits and can > be any length, hexadecimal strings are strings composed of hexadecimal > digits - and can also be any length. They usually present as an even > number of digits only because they generally represent the even numbers > of four-bit binary numbers found in machine registers: 8-bit bytes and > 16-bit words from decades ago, 32-bit, 64-bit and even 128-bit words > (e.g. for IPv6 addresses) in more recent times. I'm sure I did once > use 12-bit word lengths for some reason, but I can't now remember what > the hardware was.
Can't remember using 12 bit words, but one of the first machines I used, a CDC 6600, had 60 bit data words and 18 bit addresses. Text was normally uppercase-only, stored in 6-bit bytes ten characters per word. But if you wanted to use lower case you could use a different encoding which would occupy two of the 6-bit bytes per character, so in a way you had 12-bit bytes. Of course octal, not hex, was used to represent binary values back then. Oh, and punchcards had 12 rows so a binary image of a punchcard would actually consist of 80 12-bit words. (Or bytes.) Tilman _______________________________________________ clamav-users mailing list clamav-users@lists.clamav.net https://lists.clamav.net/mailman/listinfo/clamav-users Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: https://github.com/vrtadmin/clamav-faq http://www.clamav.net/contact.html#ml
