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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.