31 Jan
2012
31 Jan
'12
8:13 p.m.
On 31 Jan 2012 at 14:17, schoedel at kw.igs.net wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:43:59 -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote
That's what I thought--and I seem to remember a port of Unix to the
Univac 1100 series that used 9 bit "bytes". So that &0x0f will
have issues for creating dumps on that machine.
Writing truly portable code is daunting. I recall that when
"portable" text-based programs were written in FORTRAN, the first
data card in the deck was the character set for the hardware, read in
A1 format. In fact, you didn't even know that the system you were
working on did arithmetic in binary.
We seem to have forgotten decimal computers. How many modern
computer languages REQUIRE binary arithmetic and logical operations?
--Chuck
Does C require 8-bit byte addressability? Are
other "byte" lengths
permitted, such as 9 bits for system using 36 bit words?
The smallest unit addressable in standard C, the char, must be at
least 8 bits. It can be 9, or 36 for that matter.