They are meaning the same, provided that a byte is an octet (not always true : this historically was different within some old computers that had 9-bit or 6-bit bytes, but today we are deang with 10-bit bytes on networks, and with bytes with variable -size encoding, thr size being tunable depending on reliability factors ; even storage mediums no longer store bytes with 8-bit only).
So we should see the "byte" as the minimum logical unit of individually adressable information (and the world industry chose to make it 8-bit only in all modern standards) for interoperability. But octets are still needed for low-level description of physical protocols. In my opinion, it is non-sense to speak about "multi-octet" character enoding, but "multi-byte" is also very fuzzy. TUS prefers speaking about encodings that use "code units" (or arbitrary size, but supporting at least the range of distinct integers). Depending on standards and the level at which they operate, the terminology changes. But they are basically the same. As almost all encodings outside standard UTF's are now legacy and dying, replaced by standad UTF's, we should use the terminology defined in TUS and for the UCS in ISO 10646 for all encodings. Let's forget "multi-byte" or "multi-octet". "Multi-byte" is just linked to old POSIX standard libraries for C/C++ (which is fact should have been named "multi-char", not "multi-character", for these languages, given the meaning of "char" in C or C++). "Multi-octet" is used in former ISO encodings based on 8-bit code units but specified as the minimum storage requirement (additional bits may be needed and these ISO standards do not specify how they are mapped to physical encoding space, notably on storage or in transmission, and they do not give them any numerical value, these are just "identifiers", or coordinates in an 8-dimensional binary vector space, with arbitrary axis, but they don't have any arithmetic properties bound to them). 2013/9/2 Doug Ewell <[email protected]> > SteffenDaodeNurpmeso wrote: > > |If you count fixed length (>1) character sets as multibyte, you can >> |add UCS-2 and UTF-32. >> >> Yes, but no :), i would count those as multi-octet rather than >> multibyte character sets. >> > > How would you define the difference between multi-octet and multi-byte? > > > -- > Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA > http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell > >
