It was thus said that the Great woodelf once stated:
>The fact that people today seem to believe
that byte addressable is
>the only possible thing, along with a byte being 8 bits, is plain and
>simply because they haven't seen any other.
Well in most cases a byte is a unsigned 1/2 half word. I still like view
of the PDP-11 a byte is signed data. I think the lack of real byte access
has forced the C standard to have unsigned bytes because the machines (
8080,Z80) can't handle real bytes .
Which C Standard? C89? That mandates the following:
a char type, minimum of 8 bits
a short type, minimum of 16 bits
a long type, minimum of 32 bits
an int type, which is at least as large as a short, but not longer
than a long.
Also, unless otherwise noted, integral types (short, int, long) will
default to signed, *except* for char, which can be signed or
unsigned depending upon the implementation (for instance, most Unix
C compilers in the early 90s defaulted to signed chars, while most
MS-DOS C compilers defaulted to unsigned chars).
You can certainly have a signed char and an unsigned char, but just a
plain "char" would give you one of the other (implementation detail).
-spc (So, what's a "real byte" again?)