🚀 go-pugleaf

: In article ghm@bcarh8ab.bnr.ca, "brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca> writes:
: >I thought I read somewhere that C++ guarantees a "char" to be 8 bits (or
: >was that "one byte"?).

Steve Clamage (clamage@Eng.Sun.COM) responded:
: In C and C++, the size of a char or a byte is always implementation-defined,
: and neither is required to be exactly 8 bits. A char or a byte could have more
: (or fewer) than 8 bits.
: [snip, standard reference]

Right--remember back to the old C days?  A "byte" was defined
to be a sizeof() of ONE, and all other data types were based on
multiples of ONE.  (An "int" was TWO on MS-DOS platforms, or
FOUR on UNIX platforms, etc.)  The platform determined exactly what
that ONE was, and the source code was never supposed to care.

This was a major boon for portability (although I acknowledge
it's harder to guess ranges).

--
--charley                              #include <stdisclaimer.h>
charleyb@gr.hp.com    -or-    charley@agrostis.nrel.colostate.edu



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