this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

i thought the top bit was originally 0 or 1 depending on the evilness/odiousness of the rest of the number, as a parity check.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The standard itself is 7-bit, since wires were deemed more valuable than endpoint logic for the teletype machines way back then. If you're running it on an 8-bit byte machine you could do it either way, although I'm not sure what the point in parity checking individual characters is. Modern software uses 0.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Damn big-endians always looking down on the rest of us.