🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Miller (kjm@quirk.physics.ucsb.edu) wrote:
: kkto@csd.hku.hk (Isaac To ~{6E<RG?~}) writes:

: >A more crazy application pack 8 nibbles to the same word and the only
: >thing he want to do to it is to add up them nibble by nibble as unsigned
: >integers and there's guaranteed to be no overflow. 
:   
: I would assume that a nibble is a subdivision of a byte.  
: But just out of curiosity, exactly how much *is* a nibble? 

Half a byte (4 bits).  I remember the term from programming 8 bit
CPUs; one would often store information in the "high nibble" and
"low nibble" much the same way one uses the high and low bytes on
16 bit CPUs.  For example, one of the reasons 16 colors was popular on
8 bit CPUs was that foreground/background colors for a point fit
nicely into one byte that way (one color in the high nibble, one in
the low).

I haven't heard the term in _ages_, though.  Maybe 10 years?  Help me!
I'm not old enough to feel old!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Hollebeek         | Disclaimer :=> Everything above is a true statement,
Electron Psychologist |                for sufficiently false values of true.
Princeton University  | email: tim@wfn-shop.princeton.edu
----------------------| http://wfn-shop.princeton.edu/~tim (NEW! IMPROVED!)