Byte codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the eight-bit size. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter "B" by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in contrast to the bit, whose IEEE symbol is a lower-case "b". Internationally, the unit "octet", symbol "o",
Byte order mark as a byte sequence in various encodings and how those sequences might appear in a text editor that is interpreting each byte as a legacy encoding (CP1252 and caret notation for the C0 controls): Byte order mark The byte order mark (BOM) is a Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: BOM use is optional. Its presence interferes with the use of UTF-8 by software that does not expect non-ASCII bytes at the start of a file but that could otherwise