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Re: [PATCH 0/7] Support reading/writing memory on architectures with non 8-bits bytes
- From: Simon Marchi <simon dot marchi at ericsson dot com>
- To: <Paul_Koning at Dell dot com>
- Cc: <eliz at gnu dot org>, <gdb-patches at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2015 13:33:59 -0400
- Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/7] Support reading/writing memory on architectures with non 8-bits bytes
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- References: <1428522979-28709-1-git-send-email-simon dot marchi at ericsson dot com> <83d23dg1bd dot fsf at gnu dot org> <55269D1A dot 3080902 at ericsson dot com> <83vbh5e04f dot fsf at gnu dot org> <5526E87D dot 3020109 at ericsson dot com> <838ue0v1vy dot fsf at gnu dot org> <5527F3BC dot 3030005 at ericsson dot com> <1476603C-A0AA-42D4-B432-CDCF06901AF4 at dell dot com>
>> I understand your concern. The term "byte" is probably set in stone as 8-bits for pretty
>> much everybody, so trying to redefine it as variable length would probably cause more harm
>> than good.
>
> But if you work on several platforms, you would reasonably be expected to understand each of them. Debugging on A, B, and C with a working knowledge only of A isn’t very realistic.
>
> 8 bits == byte is certainly the predominant modern usage, but it hasn’t always been that way and even today it apparently isn’t quite universal. GCC used to support architectures that did not do 8-bit byte memory addressing, though that capability seems to have faded away in the past couple of years.
I guess you are referring to older architectures with 6, 7, 9, 12, 36-bits or other
byte size. I'd like to make it clear that our goal is not to support that kind of
bytes that is not a multiple of 8 bits. That would be incredibly more complicated.