Where did the data names come from?

Question

Why is a bit called a bit. Why is 8-bit byte? What made people name the 16-bit Word and so on. Where and why did their nickname appear?

I would like other people to include things like basic ASM , then separate from C / C ++ and go to SQL and similar data types.

• 1-bit
  • Bit - b inary Un it
  • Bool - Named after the inventor of logic boolen George Boole .
• 4 bits
  • Nibble is half the size of the bite / byte.
• 8 bit
  • Byte - Accepted from "bite", but sent to avoid accidental mutation to "bit" .
  • Char
  • Octet - It is a grouping of eight bits , from the Latin "octo" means "eight."
• 16-bit
  • Word (unsigned integer)
  • short (signed integer)
• 32-bit
  • Double word
  • int (signed integers)
  • unsigned (unsigned integer)
  • float (4 bytes each)

Answer 1

Wikipedia is your friend:

• bit
• nibble
• byte
• "char" just doesn't match character
• "short" is an alias for "short int"
• word "is its own or the most efficient size that the processor can handle" (thanks to Tony , noting that this is not so).
• "int" is not suitable for the "whole". The size is undefined (can be 16, 32 or 64 bits).
• "float" is short for "floating point number"
• "double" is abbreviated for "double precision floating-point number"

Answer 2

The one Aaron forgot about was Bool: it goes back to Boole logic, which is attributed to the invention of logical logic.

Answer 3

• A bit is a binary digit.
• The float should be clear (floating point semantics)

The rest, I could only guess

Answer 4

I always thought that 8 bits is called Octet, you live and study .;)

Answer 5

You may ask: Why is m called a meter? Why is 1 km represented by 1000 m?

Asked question ... Think about it in a simple way. Do not strain.

Answer 6

Your agreement on the short / int / long / word / dword for the signed is not just x86-ism; this is windows-ism (SHORT / LONG / WORD / DWORD). I don’t understand why Windows programmers love them so much when the standard (u) int N _t types are more understandable for everyone.

I do not think x86 naturally comes with a "word" and a "double word"; the registers are al, ah (8 bits), ax (16 bits), eax (32-bits). I forgot how you indicated the size of the memory-memory move.

M68K instructions have .b (bytes),. W (word), and .l (long) suffixes. No double / quad-word IIRC.

ARM has ldb (byte), ldh (halfword), ldr (register).

The PPC has bytes, half-words, words, and the double word IIRC.

In general, it’s pretty pointless to talk about “word size” because it is highly architecture dependent, and even then it tends to change (I doubt that modern x86 implements 16-bit arithmetic faster than 32-bit arithmetic).

Then, pointer size determination is also defined, but amd64 has only 48-bit virtual addresses (the first 17 bits must be all 1 or all 0).