Le 17/02/2011 13:28, Don a écrit :
Yes, I know. It's true but I think rather useless. We need a name for an 8 bit quantity, and a 16 bit quantity, and higher powers of two. 'byte' is an established name for the first one, even though historically there were 9-bit bytes. IMHO 'word' wasn't such a bad name for the second one, even though its etomology comes from the machine word size of some specific early processors. But the equally arbitrary name 'short' has become widely accepted.
8 bits: octet -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_%28computing%29
