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English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
by titanomachy 2y ago
English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
- jdblair 2y agoThe term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s. Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
- toast0 2y agoLike the sibling says, octet is useful when in a networking context, because bytes weren't uniformly sized, but also because communications protocols were sometimes only 7-bit. Serial ports and modems often operated in that mode, and UUCP influenced mail and newsgroups to only use 7-bit data; requiring encoding for data with the high bit set. Protocols that specify octets are dealing with 8-bit bytes and don't have to deal with that.