Re: Exact types and non-8-bit-bytes Position Statement

[Tom Lord <yyyy@xxxxxxx>]

   >>> My basic reaction is that I don't want us to suffer through the 
   >>> decade of
   >>> pain that changing POSIX bytes to a length other than 8 bits will 
   >>> entail.
   > 
   >> How much pain do you think there is ? Apart from anything else, 
   >> I can't see
   >> anything outside networking that's even affected.

   > Just the char = byte hassle.

Uh...no.  Sort of.

An unbounded number of high-performance algorithms depend on the 
assumption that the C type `char' is an eight bit type, and that
other integer types are power-of-2 multiples of that.

I hope (presume, even) that that's something HW designers think about.

You could argue that the OS layer shouldn't care about such
algorithms, though.

with apologies to Knuth and MIX,
-t