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From: adam@misoft.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: What is a byte
Message-ID: <650@gec-mi-at.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 11-Aug-87 20:07:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: gec-mi-a.650
Posted: Tue Aug 11 20:07:12 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Sep-87 04:13:30 EDT
References: <2068@xanth.UUCP> <218@astra.necisa.oz>
Sender: news@gec-mi-at.co.uk
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 26
Keywords: 32 bit bytes!  You ain't seen nothin', yet. 32K reference lines!!!

|In article <34@piring.cwi.nl> lambert@cwi.nl (Lambert Meertens) writes:
|>In article <2034@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
|>) 
|>) and that even 21 bits is probably barely sufficient to represent the number
|>) of written words in Chinese.
|>
|>I think that 16 bits
|>are enough to accommodate all Chinese characters, and certainly ample for
|>the about 5000 that are in actual use.
|
|There seems little chance that 65536 ideographs would suffice.

A Chinese word is made up of one or more characters. Each character has a value
of one phoneme. There are about 5000 phonemes in common use, and there is an
agreed 16-bit code for the most common phonemes. The codes are then combined
to make words.

I've been on the net for a while now and I didn't know that comp.lang.c was
short for comp.lang.chinese (though looking at that convoluted employment test
had me wondering......)

       -Adam.

/* If at first it don't compile, kludge, kludge again.*/