From: already5chosen@yahoo.com

On Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:29:47 -0600
Lynn McGuire  wrote:

> On 12/25/2025 2:49 AM, Michael S wrote:
> > On Thu, 25 Dec 2025 02:00:16 -0600
> > Lynn McGuire  wrote:
> >   
> >> On 12/24/2025 11:11 AM, Scott Lurndal wrote:  
> >>> Lynn McGuire  writes:  
> >>>> On 12/24/2025 12:22 AM, Keith Thompson wrote:  
> >>>>> Lawrence D’Oliveiro  writes:  
> >>>>>> On Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:27:53 -0500, James Kuyper wrote:  
> >>>>>>> Could you identify which document guarantees that every
> >>>>>>> Unicode locale contains "UTF-8"?  
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> How else would it work? Bytes have to be 8-bit.  
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I can't figure out what point you're trying to make.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Obviously bytes in C have to be *at least* 8 bits, but I don't
> >>>>> see the relevance.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Take a look at the article to which you replied.  How does your
> >>>>> followup have anything to do with it?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> One of several points that you snipped is that locale names can
> >>>>> contain the string "utf8", not "UTF-8".  
> >>>>
> >>>> Did C never work on the 6 bit machines such as the Univac 1108
> >>>> (36 bit)  
> >>>
> >>> Yes, there is a C compiler for the Univac machines.   The byte
> >>> size is 9 bits.  
> >>
> >> I get the feeling that you are messing with me.  That would be
> >> four 9 bit characters per 36 bit word.
> >>
> >> But the machinations to store that unnatural 9 bits would be crazy.
> >> I doubt that would be supported in hardware.
> >>
> >> Lynn
> >>  
> > 
> > Does not the same apply even stronger to your original suggestion to
> > use 6-bit characters?  
> 
> Those 6 bit characters, upper case only, were on the 36 bit (Univac 
> 1108) or 60 bit (CDC 7600) machines.  Those machines were native 6
> bit bytes, at 6 bytes per word or 10 bytes per word.
> 

In what way were 6-bit bytes "native" ?
I don't know much about either machine and not in the mood to look up,
but would be surprised if it was much more than software convention.
Especially so in CDC case.

> Those machines were  with 8 bit 
> characters.  And now we have the 64 bit machines with 8 bit
> characters. 
> 
> Lynn
> 

I think that you are looking at it from the wrong angle. The right angle
is not "superseded by the 32 bit machines", but "word-addressable
machines were superseded by the octet-addressable machines".

> We will have 128 bit machines soon in the relative sense,
> if not already.

Using the way you look at it (width of machine = width of its widest
data register) we already have commodity general-purpose 512-bit
machines for exactly ten years.
But that's a wrong way to look.

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