What is the history of why bytes are eight bits?
8-bit is enough to store a single character in the ASCII character set (with room to spare for extending the character set to support say Cyrillic). Of course 8-bits are not enough to support …
How does it matter if a character is 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit
Jul 23, 2012 · An 8-Bit character can only have 256 possible characters. Whereas a 16-bit can have 65,536. A 32-bit character can have 4,294,967,296 possible characters. A character set …
What is the advantage of choosing ASCII encoding over UTF-8?
ANSI can be many things, most being 8 bit character sets in this regard (like code page 1252 under Windows). Perhaps you were thinking of ASCII which is 7-bit and a proper subset of …
How to align on both word size and cache lines in x86
Aug 22, 2018 · Align 8-bit data at any address [don't understand this] Align 16-bit data to be contained within an aligned four-byte word; Align 32-bit data so that its base address is a …
Why is a Boolean value stored as a byte inside of a computer …
Jan 29, 2013 · In normal scenario where a boolean memory reference points to the address of 1 byte in memory which contains either all zeros (for false) or all ones (for true), now to have 1 …
language design - Software Engineering Stack Exchange
May 27, 2020 · The rule in C++, which was inherited from C, is that all operands that are smaller than int or unsigned int are first converted to one of those (with int being preferred if it can …
How Are RAM Memory Addresses Determined
Apr 24, 2021 · The key you need to understand is a "multiplexer". Imagine that you have an 8-bit computer with 8-bit addresses, wired to a single RAM chip. Inside the chip, a multiplexer …
The size of a byte in platform independent software
Dec 9, 2021 · Some DSP processor, 20 years ago. Since storing an 8 bit character in a 16 bit byte is inefficient, they had a library handling strings with two characters stored in one byte. You …
How can the same sequence of bytes might represent an integer, …
Jul 7, 2017 · The 8-bit binary pattern 10000000 (aka 0x80), can represent: in Windows Code Page 1252: the EURO symbol; in Latin-1: a control character; in UTF-8: a continuation byte …
Representing a number in 12 Bit 2's Complement Fixed Point
The original question is as follows: Consider a 12-bit two's complement fixed point representation, with 8 bits for the integer part and 4 bits for the fraction. What is the binary encoding o...