Appeasing that attitude is what prevented Microsoft from migrating to LP64. Would have been an easier task if their 32-bit LONG type never existed, they stuck with DWORD, and told the RISC platforms to live with it.
I'm saying the term "Word" abstracting the number of bytes a CPU can process in a single operation is an outdated concept. We don't really talk about word-sized values anymore. Instead we mostly explicit on the size of value in bits. Even the idea of a CPU having just one relevant word size is a bit outdated.
If you're on x86, the answer can be simultaneously 16, 32, and 64.
Don’t you mean 2,4, and 8?
"Word" is an outdated concept we should try to get rid of.
You're right. To be consistent with bytes we should call it a snack.
Henceforth, it follows that a doublesnack is called a lunch. And a quadruplesnack a fourthmeal.
5 replies →
Appeasing that attitude is what prevented Microsoft from migrating to LP64. Would have been an easier task if their 32-bit LONG type never existed, they stuck with DWORD, and told the RISC platforms to live with it.
It's very useful on hardware that is not an x86 CPU.
As an abstraction on the size of a CPU register, it really turned out to be more confusing than useful.
3 replies →
such as...?
How exactly ? How else do you suggest CPUs do addressing ?
Or are you suggesting to increase the size of a byte until it's the same size as a word, and merge both concepts ?
I'm saying the term "Word" abstracting the number of bytes a CPU can process in a single operation is an outdated concept. We don't really talk about word-sized values anymore. Instead we mostly explicit on the size of value in bits. Even the idea of a CPU having just one relevant word size is a bit outdated.
There are 4 bytes in word:
I've seen 6 8-bit characters/word (Burroughs large systems, they also support 8 6-bit characters/word)