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Re: binary-io (was Re: rfc 2045 base64 encoding/decoding module)
On Sat, Feb 12, 2000 at 07:02:34PM -0000, Gary Houston wrote:
> > From: Ole Myren Rohne <ole.rohne@cern.ch>
> > Date: 11 Feb 2000 10:03:42 +0100
>
> > BTW, I think octet is the proper name for 8-bit bytes.
>
> I thought it would be better to specify that the byte size be the same
> as C is using on the platform. It would be inconvenient to support
> 8-bit bytes on a machine where the byte size and C char were some
> other size, such as 16 to 64 bits (I don't know if it's likely that
> such machines will be (re)-introduced in the near future, even for
> niche markets, but it seems like a useful thought experiment. Does
> anyone have a PDP-10 emulator?)
I don't think it's worth worrying about. The whole world has long since
standardized on the 8-bit byte as the smallest addressable unit.
There have been machines that could only address 32-bit quanitities,
but AFAIK they have just had a special char * type, and not a special
char type.