On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 06:39:37PM -0700, Darren New wrote:
David Brown wrote:
(*You could use the PDP-10 terminology and cal them 16-bit bytes).
You'll note that "octet" is the standard name for an 8-bit unit of data.
There's a reason for that - byte means "the smallest addressable data in
the computer architecture". :-)
On the PDP, it was just a subset of the bits (36) in a register. It
could be 3, 1, 4, 17, or whatever you wanted. It doesn't mean
smallest subset, it just means group of bits.
The terminology survives in Common Lisp with
(ldb (byte 17 3) value)
to extract a 17-bit byte starting at bit 3 in the 'value'. Of course,
this is an l-value, and can be 'setf'ed.
David
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