Greg Ewing wrote: > > Blarg. Well, I think the wording of that part of the > standard is braindamaged. The word "byte" already has > a pre-existing meaning outside of C, and the C standard > shouldn't be redefining it for its own purposes. > > This is like a financial document that defines "dollar" > as "the unit of currency in use in the country concerned". > Thoroughly confusing and unnecessary. > > Particularly since they seem to just be defining "byte" > to mean the same thing as "char". Why not just use the > term "char" in the first place? > They are totally different concepts: byte is not a (C) type, but a unit, the one returned by the sizeof operator. One char occupies one byte of memory, and in memory, they are the same, but conceptually, they are totally different, from the C point of view at least. For example, C impose that sizeof(unsigned type) == sizeof(signed type) for any type, so if one byte is one char, unsigned char would be a byte too, and so unsigned char and char would be the same, which is obviously wrong.
cheers, David _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
