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# Byte

Byte (symbol: B, term invented by Werner Buchholz in 1956) is a basic unit of information, now practically always consisting of 8 bits (for which we also use the term octet), which allow storing 2^8 = 256 distinct values (for example a number in range 0 to 255). This is commonly the smallest unit of computer memory a CPU is able to operate on; memory addresses are assigned by steps of one byte. We use bytes to measure the size of memory and derive higher units such as a kilobyte (kB, 1000 bytes), kibibyte (KiB, 1024 bytes), megabyte (MB, 10^6 bytes) and so forth. In conventional programming a one byte variable is seen as very small and used mostly when we find ourselves pressured by tight memory constraints (e.g. embedded) or to mimic older 8bit computers ("retro games" etc.): one byte can be used to store very small numbers (while in today's mainstream processors basic numbers usually consist of 4 or 8 bytes), text characters (ASCII, ...), very primitive colors (see RGB332, palettes, ...) etc.

Historically byte was used to stand for the basic addressable unit of memory capable of storing one text character or another "basic value" and could therefore have a different size than 8 bits: for example ASCII machines might have had a 7bit byte, 16bit machines a 16bit byte etc.; in C (standard 99) `char` is the "byte" data type, its byte size is always 1 (`sizeof(char) == 1`), though its number of bits (`CHAR_BIT`) can be greater or equal to 8; if you need an exact 8bit byte use types such as `int8_t` and `uint8_t` from the standard `stdint` library. From now on we will implicitly talk about 8bit bytes.

Value of one byte can be written exactly with two hexadecimal digits with each digit always corresponding to higher/lower 4 bits, making mental conversions very easy; this is very convenient compared to decimal representation, so programmers prefer to write byte values in hexadecimal. For example a byte whose binary value is 11010010 is D2 in hexadecimal (1101 is always D and 0010 is always 2), while in decimal we get 210.

Byte frequency/probability: it may be interesting and/or useful (e.g. for compression) to know how often different byte values appear in the data we process with computers -- indeed, this always DEPENDS; if we are working with plain ASCII text, we will never encounter values above 127, and on the other hand if we are processing photos from a polar expedition, we will likely mostly encounter byte values of 255 (as snow will cause most pixels to be completely white). In general we may expect values such as 0, 255, 1 and 2 to be most frequent, as many times these are e.g. assigned special meanings in data encodings, they may be cutoff values etc. Here is a table of measured byte frequencies in real data:

{ Measured by me. ~drummyfish }

type of data | least c. | 2nd least c. | 3rd least c. | 3rd most c. | 2nd most c. | most c.
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
GNU/Linux x86 executable | 0x9e (0%) | 0xb2 (0%) | 0x9a (0%) | 0x48 (2%) | 0xff (3%) | 0x00 (32%)
bare metal ARM executable | 0xcf (0%) | 0xb7 (0%) | 0xa7 (0%) | 0xff (2%) | 0x01 (3%) | 0x00 (15%)
UTF8 English txt book | 0x00 (0%) | 0x01 (0%) | 0x02 (0%) | 0x74 (`t`, 6%) | 0x65 (`e`, 8%) | 0x20 (``, 14%)
C source code | 0x00 (0%) | 0x01 (0%) | 0x02 (0%) | 0x31 (`1`, 6%) | 0x20 (``, 12%) | 0x2c (`,`, 16%)
raw 24bit RGB photo image | 0x07 (0%) | 0x09 (0%) | 0x08 (0%) | 0xdd (0%) | 0x00 (1%) | 0xff (25%)

## See Also

- bit
- word

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