Byte addressing 8 bits; in fact, depending on the platform, byte sizes of 1 to 48 bits have been used in the past. Therefore, the term "octet" is used where the context makes byte-length ambiguous. For example, in the 1980s, Honeywell mainframes had 36-bit words, and were byte-addressable in 9-bit bytes, or "nonets", They used 7- or 8-bit character codes, either of which were stored one to each 9-bit byte, making characters individually addressable. To illustrate why byte addressing is useful, consider the IBM 7094, which is word-addressable and has no concept of a byte. It has 36-bit words, and stores its
LEB128 single byte 0x00. As an example, here is how the unsigned number 624485 gets encoded: Unsigned LEB128 and VLQ (variable-length quantity) both compress any given integer into not only the same number of bits, but exactly the same bits—the two formats differ only in exactly how those bits are arranged. A signed number is represented similarly, except that the two's complement number is sign extended up to a multiple of 7 bits (ensuring that the most significant bit is zero for a positive number and one for a negative number). Then the number is broken into groups as for the