5 ms·
I believe the byte changed its meaning like many words did in the past. To a lot of younger developers a byte is synonymous with an octet.
by mccorrinall 5y ago
I believe the byte changed its meaning like many words did in the past. To a lot of younger developers a byte is synonymous with an octet.
- JadedBlueEyes 5y agoIn the CS tests for every UK exam board, a byte is always 8 bits
- jon_adler 5y agoA byte has been synonymous with an octet for as long as I can remember. I found a Wikipedia article [1] that describes the transition of a byte meaning the number of bits to encode character of text to an octet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_information
- saagarjha 5y agoIn C it’s not when CHAR_BIT != 8.
- tjoff 5y agoIt does depend on context though. Transports often use 8b/10b, which is why SATA 6Gb/s is also 600 MB/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding A byte is also referred to the smallest addressable unit. Which in most cases is 8 bits but many (I guess mostly niche architectures) have much larger characters/bytes, and is still very much relevant.
- mccorrinall 5y agoI love your comments! Always learning something new. (this time about SATA)
- can16358p 5y agoI just had to google "is byte always 8 bits" so see that in historical context it wasn't always the case. But probably for all practical purposes in modern era, we can safely assume it's always 8 bits.