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This article refers to the unit of binary information. Byte was also the name of a popular computer industry magazine, see Byte magazine.
A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. It is also one of the basic integral data types in many programming languages.
1 Meanings
The word "byte" has several meanings, all closely related:
- A contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits. On modern computers, an eight-bit byte or octet is by far the most common. This was not always the case. Certain older models have used six-, seven-, or nine-bit bytes - for instance on the 36-bit architecture of the PDP-10. Another example of a non eight-bit sequence is the 12-bit slab of the NCR-315 . A byte is always atomic on the system, meaning that it is the smallest addressable unit. An eight-bit byte can hold 256 possible values (28 = 256) -- enough to store an unsigned integer ranging from 0 to 255, a signed integer from -128 to 127, or a character of a seven-bit (such as ASCII) or eight-bit character encoding.
- A contiguous sequence of bits that comprises a sub-field of a longer sequence known as a word. On some computers it is possible to address bytes of arbitrary length. This usage is reflected, for example, in LDB and DPB assembly instructions for field extraction on a PDP-10, which survive as bytewise operations in Common LispCommon Lisp commonly abbreviated CL (not to be confused with Combinatory logic which is also abbreviated CL), is a dialect of Lisp, standardised by ANSI X3. Developed to standardize the divergent variants of Lisp which predated it, it is not an implementa; and in the six-bit bytes of the IBM 1401The IBM 1401 was a variable wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959 and marketed as an inexpensive "Business Computer". It was withdrawn on February 8, 1971. Although described as a ( BCD) computer, each byte (or alphameri.
- A datatypeIn computer science, a datatype (often simply type is a name or label for a set of values and some operations which can be performed on that set of values. Programming languages implicitly or explicitly support one or more datatypes; these types may act a or synonym for a datatype in certain programming languages. CThe C Programming Language Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early, for example, defines byte as a storage unit capable of at least being large enough to hold any character of the execution environment (clause 3.5 of the C standard). Since the C
char integral data type can hold at least 8 bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1), a byte in C is at least capable of holding 256 different values (signed or unsigned char doesn't matter). JavaJava is an object-oriented programming language developed primarily by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. The language, initially called Oak (named after the oak trees outside Gosling's office), was intended to replace C++, although the fea plays it simpler. Java's integral byte data type is always defined as consisting of 8 bits and being a signed data type, holding values from -128 to 127.
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