Absolute size of 'short'

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1382 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I wanna say 'int:9 color' or 'int color:9' and only use up one byte
>on a Honeywell or Sperry.

Yes!  It annoys me that people have been brainwashed into thinking
that a "byte" is necessarily 8 bits and that there is something
special about that chunk size other than its current popularity.
CDCs, older ones at least, had generic "byte" instructions that
could handle any reasonable number of contiguous bits as a unit.
It is the BIT that is truly fundamental; if one wishes to propose
some data size improvements to a C-like language, please improve
our access to bits and arbitrary clusters of them.