Grizlyk said:
No, it is not "eat dung". Ii is standard international (SI) measure of
information or storage capacity, used by most people in practical
cases, similarly to meter or second.
You are right formally, but fortunatelly, the part of standard can be
silently ignored at practical cases, as well as we can silently ignore
existence of keyword "goto".
Actually, we cannot ignore either of those in this group: neither for
practical purposes nor (and more importantly) for discussing C++.
I am shure, if you will describe storage
capacity elsewere out of C++ context, much better for all (and for you
too) to use constant "byte, Kbyte, Mbyte and so on" size instead of
"13-bit C++ bytes", if you want, that your opponent can understand what
did you say.
Sure. It is somewhat unfortunate that the C++ standard is intruding quite a
bit into the ordinary English language by specializing the meanings of
common terms such
as "exception", "object", "undefined" / "unspecified" / "implementation
defined" (behavior) or, in this case, "byte". However, communication in
this group is greatly simplified if everybody just sticks to two simple
conventions:
a) If the standard defines the meaning of a term, do not use that term with
a different meaning without explicitly indicating so.
b) If the standard provides a term for a concept and you mean that concept,
use the terminology used in the standard.
As these two rules of thumb have proven quite useful, regulars tend to be
quite opinionate about breaking those rules willfully.
Note that I am not arguing that you should not use "byte" in its ordinary
meaning outside this group. But within this group, it has proven useful to
avoid confusion arising from competing meanings. The resolution of such
competition is: the meaning used in the standard wins.
And fortunatelly, "byte" is not C++ keyword, so we can easy use "char"
- C++ specific memory size as base for all types.
That "byte" is not a keyword does not make it any less C++ specific
terminology as, say, "object", which is also not a keyword.
Best
Kai-Uwe Bux