8 Aug
2002
8 Aug
'02
11:58 a.m.
On Thursday, 2002-08-08, 11:54, CEST, Ketil Z. Malde wrote:
[...] Isn't "byte" or "octet" a better name for what files store and sockets transmit?
In school, university and whatever, I always learned that a byte is a sequence of eight bits. But later I read (I think in the Internet RFC) something about the possibility of bytes being seven bits long. An octet is, as the name suggest, defined to be a sequence of eight bits. AFAIK, there is no guaranty about how many bits "file elements" have. In Ada 95, there is an implementation dependent type Stream_Element (and also an implementation dependent type Storage_Element which corresponds to memory cells). But in practice, I think, it is ok to assume a file element being an octet.
[...]
Wolfgang