Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits.Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
This will not fit in a char on most systems, so more than one is used for some of them, as in the variable-length encoding UTF-8 where each code point takes 1 to 4 bytes. Furthermore, a "character" may require more than one code point (for instance with combining characters), depending on what is meant by the word "character".
The symbol for the binary digit is either "bit", per the IEC 80000-13:2008 standard, or the lowercase character "b", per the IEEE 1541-2002 standard. Use of the latter may create confusion with the capital "B" which is the international standard symbol for the byte.
char * pc [10]; // array of 10 elements of 'pointer to char' char (* pa)[10]; // pointer to a 10-element array of char The element pc requires ten blocks of memory of the size of pointer to char (usually 40 or 80 bytes on common platforms), but element pa is only one pointer (size 4 or 8 bytes), and the data it refers to is an array of ten ...
1 byte 8 bits Byte, octet, minimum size of char in C99( see limits.h CHAR_BIT) −128 to +127 0 to 255 2 bytes 16 bits x86 word, minimum size of short and int in C −32,768 to +32,767 0 to 65,535 4 bytes 32 bits x86 double word, minimum size of long in C, actual size of int for most modern C compilers, [8] pointer for IA-32-compatible processors
A char (one byte) will be 1-byte aligned. A short (two bytes) will be 2-byte aligned. An int (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A long (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A float (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. A double (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned on Windows and 4-byte aligned on Linux (8-byte with -malign-double compile time ...
The binary code assigns a pattern of binary digits, also known as bits, to each character, instruction, etc. For example, a binary string of eight bits (which is also called a byte) can represent any of 256 possible values and can, therefore, represent a wide variety of different items.
Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture, but today it almost always means eight bits – that is, an octet. An 8-bit byte can represent 256 (2 8) distinct values, such as non-negative integers from 0 to 255, or signed integers from −128 to ...