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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 22:56:19 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:47:15 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> The idea of defining different-sized bytes is a real plus.

What they meant by “bytes” was really just “bitfields”.

With the move to 64-bit addressing, I’ve often felt that it was a missed 
opportunity to reserve the bottom 3 bits for a bit offset within a byte. 
That way, you could have arbitrary bitfield addressing available, without 
any change to the pointer format. Of course it would only be available in 
a select few instructions (e.g. “load bitfield”, “store bitfield”); other 
memory-referencing instructions would either ignore those bottom 3 bits or 
insist they be zero.