Byte explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of "bite" to avoid accidental mutation to "bit". Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term
Mask (computing) the size of the array; however, it is often faster on many processors to restrict the size of the hash table to powers of two sizes and use a bitmask instead. Mask (computing) In computer science, a mask is data that is used for bitwise operations, particularly in a bit field. Using a mask, multiple bits in a byte, nibble, word etc. can be set either on, off or inverted from on to off (or vice versa) in a single bitwise operation. To turn certain bits on, the bitwise codice_2 operation can be used, following the principle that codice_3 and