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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).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.
36 bits – size of word on Univac 1100-series computers and Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 56 bits (7 bytes) – cipher strength of the DES encryption standard 2 6: 64 bits (8 bytes) – size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values – size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number
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 bytes (sizeof * pa == 10).
The byte, 8 bits, 2 nibbles, is possibly the most commonly known and used base unit to describe data size. The word is a size that varies by and has a special importance for a particular hardware context. On modern hardware, a word is typically 2, 4 or 8 bytes, but the size varies dramatically on older hardware.
Historically, the term character was used to denote a specific number of contiguous bits. While a character is most commonly assumed to refer to 8 bits (one byte) today, other options like the 6-bit character code were once popular, [2] [3] and the 5-bit Baudot code has been used in the past as well.
After the introduction of the IBM System/360 design, which uses eight-bit characters and supports lower-case letters, the standard size of a character (or more accurately, a byte) becomes eight bits. Word sizes thereafter are naturally multiples of eight bits, with 16, 32, and 64 bits being commonly used.
A wide character refers to the size of the datatype in memory. It does not state how each value in a character set is defined. Those values are instead defined using character sets, with UCS and Unicode simply being two common character sets that encode more characters than an 8-bit wide numeric value (255 total) would allow.
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.