Character (computing) of the “basic execution character set” and (in newer C standards) UTF-8 code units which implies a minimum size of 8 bits. The exact number of bits can be checked via codice_2 macro. By far the most common size is 8 bits, and the POSIX standard "requires" it to be 8 bits. Since Unicode requires at least 21 bits to store a single code point, it is usually impossible to store one inside a single codice_1; instead a variable-length encoding such as UTF-8 must be used. Unfortunately, the fact that a character was historically stored in a single byte led
Byte addressing systems, such as the PDP-10, use word addressing but facilitate access to individual bytes using special instructions which can access memory using a "byte pointer", which contains both a word address and the index of a specific byte within the word. Byte addressing Byte addressing refers to hardware architectures which support accessing individual bytes of data rather than only larger units called words, which would be "word-addressable". Such computers are sometimes called "byte machines" (in contrast to "word machines"). The basic unit of digital storage is called a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common architectures can address