April 23, 2021
9:56 p.m.
On 4/23/21 2:07 PM, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
It had a 16-bit byte, which was fine when you were used to it but would confuse new staff, and we programmed it (mostly) in C.
Yes, quite a few CPUs like that exist in the embedded world. And historically some mainframish CPUs had 9-, or even variable-width bytes. I put "theoretical interest" in that zic.c commit message only because as I understand it none of those CPUs are practical platforms for running zic today. Come to think of it, even if they were practical platforms the unpatched zic.c code would likely work anyway because high-order bits would be silently discarded on output.