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From: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Size of SysV "block" (really: byte != 8 bits)
Message-ID: <274@wrs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Jul-87 17:11:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: wrs.274
Posted: Fri Jul 24 17:11:15 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jul-87 01:24:19 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <857@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6144@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Organization: Wind River Systems, Emeryville, CA
Lines: 27

In article <6144@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) writes:
>In article <857@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>>A byte is therefore exactly 8 bits.  No more and no less.  Opinions to
>>the contrary belong in the 1960s.  Let them lie there and die there.
>
>And people who believe that 8 bits is sufficiently to encode a
>character are either naive or stupid.

Well I've never yet had a problem communicating with any machine that uses
ASCII (American *STANDARD* Code for Information Interchange), and it's my
(possibly deluded :-) belief that there are a lot of machines out there that
do like I do and use 8 bit bytes for holding characters. Let's see - there
are Z80's (and maybe a couple of dozen other 8 bit micros), 8086 family,
ns32000 family, pdp-11, vax, 68000 family, Z8000, amd2900 family, etc.
etc. etc. Then we start looking at uarts and other communication devices-
we have the Z80 DART/SIO, 8080 devices, the 6502 ACIA, plus the countless
others that are not attached to any architecture. I don't know about the
rest of the world, but it looks to me as if 8 bit chars are here to stay.
(Just out of idle curiosity what size did you have in mind for a character,
and WHY?)
--
		dg@wrs.UUCP - David Goodenough

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