On 2021-02-17 05:57, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 11:13:08AM +1300, Greg Ewing wrote:
On 17/02/21 7:10 am, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>"It's Greek letter, like pi that you may remember from maths
>class. In some technical computer science, the Greek L, lambda, is used
>as the symbol for functions."
The most accurate answer seems to be "Because somebody made
a mistake transcribing a mathematics paper many years ago." :-)
Not according to Alonzo Church, who at various times has stated that it
was either more or less chosen at random, or that it was derived from
Whitehead and Russell's x̂ (x-hat) via ∧x to λx to make it easier for the
printers.
Either way it wasn't a mistake, but a deliberate choice.
It is really remarkable how much attention lambda gets. As far as I
know, mathematicians don't ask why Hilbert chose epsilon for his epsilon
calculus, and nobody ever asks where "byte" comes from.
It is, apparently, a deliberate misspelling of bite, to avoid it being
accidently changed to bit. But why *bite*?
The first published use of "byte" apparently was in a 1956 IBM memo by
Werner Buchholz:
"[…] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the
ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long.
Figure 2 shows the Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word,
coming from Memory in parallel, into characters, or 'bytes' as we have
called them, to be sent to the Adder serially."
The memo already shows that Buchholz and IBM were thinking of
multiple bits being a "word", so it's not clear why bytes. There's no
ordinary sense that a collection of bits (as in "a bit of stuff") is
considered "a bite".
It's like eating a sausage. You start at one end and take bites off it
until you've eaten it all.
So a "byte" is part of a word (a word contains multiple characters).
Language is fun.
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