Re:The prospects for 128 bit processors (1995)
by kens on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @07:11PM
(#30448582)
Having done some network code on the 16-bit Xerox Alto, it's a big pain if you can't access bytes directly. If you want to deal with characters, you need to do shifts and AND operations, depending if you want the odd byte or the even byte. It's very annoying.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The prospects for 128 bit processors (1995)
by akvadrako on Thursday February 24, 2022 @04:56AM
(#30452903)
Do you mean characters as in real languages? Because then bytes don't matter, but codepoints, which can be any length.
Obviously dealing with legacy formats that are bit or byte aligned should still be supported using char arrays, it just would require compiler assistance for pointers.