> Some programming languages Other answers go into detail about why, but you have a more fundamental misconception: nearly all use at least 1 byte, the majorit

> Some programming languages Other answers go into detail about why, but you have a more fundamental misconception: nearly all use at least 1 byte, the majority of which use 4 bytes. Using 4 bytes is partially historical, x86 used to suffer from several performance pitfalls if pointer accesses weren't aligned (multiples of 4). While his generally isn't an issue on x86 any more, other architectures do still have this limitation. ABIs designed during that era (i.e. many of the ones we use today) inherited that limitation out of nessecity. Furthermore some instructions (including on recent x86 designs, I think) need to be 4 byte aligned.