You mean sizeof({int, long, float, double, char}) == 8, right? [edit: no, I guess not. sizeof returns char-sized units, not bytes. TIL.] But why? I don't anti

You mean sizeof({int, long, float, double, char}) == 8, right? [edit: no, I guess not. sizeof returns char-sized units, not bytes. TIL.] But why? I don't anticipate we'll ever stop caring about using RAM efficiently, so I assert we need a way to operate on smaller types. The compiler could provide the traditional API I want this by masking/shifting without instructions specifically for smaller types, but (a) then there's a lot of extra masking and such to do anything, and (b) it would be bad for thread safety. IIUC Alpha was a bit like this in that read-write operations done from different threads on adjacent bytes within a word might clobber each other. Not great... And as colejohnson66 said, there are DSPs like this, but they are explicitly not designed for general-purpose programs.