Computer number format with a specific number of bits are used to represent varying things and have specific names. A "byte" is a bit string containing the number of bits needed to represent a character. On most modern computers, this is an eight bit string. Because the definition of a byte is related to the number of bits composing a character, some older computers have used a different bit length for their byte. In many computer architectures, the byte is used to address specific areas of memory. For example, even though 64-bit processors may address memory sixty-four bits at a time, they may
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