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The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
A pointer to a type that's large enough to fill a word will be a simple address, while a pointer such as char* or void* will be a wide pointer: a pair of the address of a word and the offset of a byte within that word. Converting between pointer types is therefore not necessarily a trivial operation and can lose information if done incorrectly.
Bytes can be manipulated by a combination of shift and mask operations in registers. Moving a single byte from one arbitrary location to another may require the equivalent of the following: LOAD the word containing the source byte; SHIFT the source word to align the desired byte to the correct position in the target word
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
Frequently, half, full, double and quadruple words consist of a number of bytes which is a low power of two. A string of four bits is usually a nibble . In information theory , one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [ 3 ] or the information that is gained when the value of such a ...
On the PDP-6/10, special instructions operated on a byte pointer which included a word address, a bit offset, and a bit width. The LDB / DPB instructions loaded or stored one byte, the IBP instruction incremented the byte pointer, and the ILDB / IDPB instructions incremented the byte pointer and then loaded or stored the next byte. These ...
The byte has been a commonly used unit of measure for much of the information age to refer to a number of bits.In the early days of computing, it was used for differing numbers of bits based on convention and computer hardware design, but today means 8 bits.
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, is an invention by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (English: Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic) which uses only the characters 1 and 0, and some remarks on its usefulness.