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
Stochastic computing of generating random biased bit streams. In practice, these streams are generated with pseudo-random number generators. Unfortunately, generating (pseudo-)random bits is fairly costly (compared to the expense of, e.g., a full adder). Therefore, the gate-level advantage of stochastic computing is typically lost. Third, the analysis of stochastic computing assumes that the bit streams are independent (uncorrelated). If this assumption does not hold, stochastic computing can fail dramatically. For instance, if we try to compute formula_19 by multiplying a bit stream for formula_3 by itself, the process fails: since formula_21, the stochastic computation would yield formula_22, which is not generally true