Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?)

On 25/03/2025 18:18, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

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,

1985? That's a bit late! 8-bit processors started around the mid-70s, pretty much 50 years ago. I would guess more people started using those during the late 70s, than were using those odd mainframes, since they were so much more accessible. You could literally buy a CPU from a corner electronics store.
(I believe the IBM 360 used 8-bit bytes from the 1960s.)

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).

These days I officially use 'u8' for the type (which also takes care of any questions about its signedness), but also use a 'byte' designation, which has existed in my products since 1981 -- 44 years. And I doubt I was the first!