"Russel Winder" <rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote in message news:mailman.1748.1297936806.4748.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > A word is the natural length of an integer item in the processor. > It is necessarily machine specific. cf. DEC-10 had 9-bit bytes > and 36-bit word, IBM 370 has an 8-bit byte and a 32-bit word, > though addresses were 24-bit. ix86 follows IBM 8-bit byte and > 32-bit word.
Right. Programmers may have gotten used to "word" being 2-bytes due to things like the Win API and x86 Assemblers not updating their usage for the sake of backwards compatibility, but in the EE world where the term originates, "word" is device-specific and is very useful as such. > Do not be afraid of the word. Fear leads to anger. Anger > leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. (*) This version is better: http://media.bigoo.ws/content/image/funny/funny_1309.jpg
