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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning
 a string from a C program?)
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:18:14 +0100
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On 25.03.2025 10:38, David Brown wrote:
> 
> Personally, I think [...]

(I'll skip most of that in your post.)

> 
> Thus pretty much any programmer in the last 50 years sees "byte" as
> synonymous with 8-bit octet, including C programmers,

Be careful if you are not speaking for yourself, and especially if
you extrapolate to such a lengthy period of time.

50 years ago was 1975 (and about the time I wrote my first programs).
And it was even some years later that I programmed on CDC 175 or 176,
a machine with a word length of 60 bit, 6 bit characters and Pascal's
'text' data type was a 'packed array [1..10] of character'. (Just to
give an example.) Computer scientists generally had a much broader
view back these days.

If you'd have said 40 years ago, about the time when MS DOS systems
got popular, I would have agreed about the prevalent opinion. OTOH,
with all this populism a lot of quality degradation entered the IT
scenery (at least, as far as my observation goes); things were not
taken as accurately as would have been appropriate.

> and for the last
> 30 years or so it has been the ISO standard definition of the term.

I suppose you meant the "ISO _C_ standard definition"?

I'm asking because I was in my post already referring to international
standards (ISO, CCITT/ITU-T, etc.) that have defined 'octet' for the
purpose of unambiguously identifying an 8 bit entity. The 'octet' went
into the ASN.1 protocol standard notation (that you will now also find
in IETF's RFC standards).

Janis

> [...]