Question

I was going through http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq/index.html and there I found that byte can also be 64 bits http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq/very-large-bytes.html. Is it possible and what is the use of that much amount of storage capacity for a byte?

Answer 1

The point isn’t the usefulness of a big-byte “per se”, but the fact that, for the standard, a byte is the smallest addressable quantity on the system¹; if a system cannot address its memory in units smaller than 64 bits, then char will be 64 bit.

Obviously it’s almost impossible to find such strange stuff on modern general-purpose computers, these weirdnesses come out on very specialized hardware (I heard DSPs are particularly prone to this kind of stuff), usually for performance reasons.

You can see more about this in this other FAQ.

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1. As far as is larger than 8 bits and is capable of holding a basic set of characters (alphanumeric characters plus some symbol, IIRC).