Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Janis Papanagnou 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 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 42 Message-ID: References: <868qp1ra5f.fsf@linuxsc.com> <20250319115550.0000676f@yahoo.com> <20250319201903.00005452@yahoo.com> <86r02roqdq.fsf@linuxsc.com> <20250320204642.0000423a@yahoo.com> <87iko3s3h2.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com> <874izi82a4.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:18:17 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="3f0884ca912002be49fa93c6b780a4fc"; logging-data="4091625"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18ZIblui8R/izUk6ostsMB1" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:8jsYiKL/xgQRgtiTYUsQYD3BfcE= In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Draft-Status: N1110 Bytes: 3289 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 > [...]