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The basic unit of digital storage is a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common instruction set architectures can address more than 8 bits of data at a time. For example, 32-bit x86 processors have 32-bit general-purpose registers and can handle 32-bit (4-byte) data in single instructions. However, data in memory may be of various lengths.
The reason for this is that a byte is normally the smallest unit of addressable memory (i.e. data with a unique memory address). This applies to bitwise operators as well, which means that even though they operate on only one bit at a time they cannot accept anything smaller than a byte as their input.
Most modern computers are byte-addressable. Each address identifies a single 8-bit byte of storage. Data larger than a single byte may be stored in a sequence of consecutive addresses. There exist word-addressable computers, where the minimal addressable storage unit is exactly the processor's word.
Smallest addressable unit of the machine that can contain basic character set. It is an integer type. Actual type can be either signed or unsigned. It contains CHAR_BIT bits. [3] ≥8 %c [CHAR_MIN, CHAR_MAX] — signed char: Of the same size as char, but guaranteed to be signed. Capable of containing at least the [−127, +127] range. [3] [a ...
Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a special type of computer memory used in certain very-high-speed searching applications. It is also known as associative memory or associative storage and compares input search data against a table of stored data, and returns the address of matching data. [1]
The size of the minimum addressable unit of memory can have complex trade-offs. Using a larger MAU allows the same amount of memory to be covered with a smaller address, which can substantially decrease the memory requirements of a program. However, using a smaller MAU makes it easier to work efficiently with small items of data.
The Boost C++ Libraries provide a dynamic_bitset class [4] whose size is specified at run-time. The D programming language provides bit arrays in its standard library, Phobos, in std.bitmanip. As in C++, the [] operator does not return a reference, since individual bits are not directly addressable on most hardware, but instead returns a bool.
A memory address a is said to be n-byte aligned when a is a multiple of n (where n is a power of 2). In this context, a byte is the smallest unit of memory access, i.e. each memory address specifies a different byte. An n-byte aligned address would have a minimum of log 2 (n) least-significant zeros when expressed in binary.