>>21
But CHAR_BIT would be 16. I still don't see an issue.
We've managed just fine with different endianess, haven't we?
Likely an 8-bit byte file format would become standard if a non-8-bit byte architecture was to become popular, at least until that number of bits took a considerabe amount of market share.
The byte type being called char in C is a misnomer. Far better if the types were byte, word, dword, qword. Then you could write
word int = 4;
byte string[15];
and not have your intent clouded behind opague type names.
Though perhaps I am wrong on this. I don't know nearly enough of the details or the mindset of the standardising comittee.