<div style="white-space:pre-wrap">I'm not quite sure what you mean. Swift has a type called Int8 that represents numbers from -128 to 127 using 8 bits. I don't see how this "excludes" computers. <br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 13:01 Daryle Walker via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" target="_blank">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>When I first looked into Swift, I noticed that the base type was called “UInt8” (and “Int8”) and not something like “Byte.” I know modern computers have followed the bog standard 8/16/32(/64) architecture for decades, but why hard code it into the language/library? Why should 36-bit processors with 9-bit bytes, or processors that start at 16 bits, be excluded right off the bat? Did you guys see a problem with how (Objective-)C(++) had to define its base types in a mushy way to accommodate the possibility non-octet bytes?</div><div><br></div><div>BTW, is there an equivalent of CHAR_BIT, the number of bits per byte, in the library? Or are we supposed to hard code an “8”?</div><div><br></div><div>
<div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word"><div>— </div><div>Daryle Walker<br>Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie<br>darylew AT mac DOT com </div></div>
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</blockquote></div><div dir="ltr">-- <br></div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">-Saagar Jha</div></div>