On 2017-10-12, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 02:06 am, Grant Edwards wrote: > >> It sure was an education the first I wrote C code for >> a machine where >> >> 1 == sizeof char == sizeof int == sizeof long == sizeof float == sizeof >> double >> >> All were 32 bits. > > > Does that imply that on that machine 1 byte = 32 bits?
Maybe. That depends on what you mean by "byte". There is no such thing as a "byte" in C. The smallest addressable unit of memory in C is a "char". Nothing in C says that incrementing an address by 1 gets you to the next 8-bit chunk of memory. According to the "Byte" Wikipedia article: The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size -- byte-sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. The IEEE standards use the word "octet" to refer to a an 8-bit chunk of memory. When working with an architecture with a 32-bit char, you didn't use the word "byte" if you wanted to avoid confusion. > I don't suppose you remember the name of the machine do you? Texas Instruments TMS32C40. It's pretty common on DSPs to have only a single size for all datatypes. The 'C40 as pretty high-end -- it had floating point. Though I had to write routines to convert between IEE-754 and the native 32-bit format when I wanted to exchange floating point data with the outside world. :) -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
