The one I worked with had a C compiler as well, though it was K&R and not ANSI. The instruction set supported operations on 8-bit values by op codes which selec

The one I worked with had a C compiler as well, though it was K&R and not ANSI. The instruction set supported operations on 8-bit values by op codes which selected the lower or higher 8 bits of a word, so the compiler itself worked transparently as you would expect (the architecture was big endian so that had to be taken into account sometimes, but that's true of byte-addressable systems too).