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Having done some network code on the 16-bit Xerox Alto, it's a big pain if you can't access bytes directly. If you want to deal with characters, you need to do
by kens 5y ago
Having done some network code on the 16-bit Xerox Alto, it's a big pain if you can't access bytes directly. If you want to deal with characters, you need to do shifts and AND operations, depending if you want the odd byte or the even byte. It's very annoying.
- phkahler 5y agoWell let's just switch to 32bit unicode characters and drop all this UTF8 stuff. But even then we would addressing 32 bit words with a 64bit machine.
- akvadrako 5y agoDo you mean characters as in real languages? Because then bytes don't matter, but codepoints, which can be any length. Obviously dealing with legacy formats that are bit or byte aligned should still be supported using char arrays, it just would require compiler assistance for pointers.