From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Wed Apr 15 2009 - 03:13:43 CDT
On 13 Apr 2009, at 21:31, William J Poser wrote:
> I'm a little surprised that no enterprising manufacturer has come out
> with "Unicode machine" with 21 bit words with addressable 7 bit
> "tribbles".
> Just think of the Start Trek tie-ins!
Various byte-sizes have been practiced in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Uncommon_groups_of_bits
Today, except in legacy systems, one will have to look hard find bytes
of other sizes than 8 bits. Computer hardware is maximized around
common use, and text processing is typically a very small part of all
the computing done, suggesting it is not worthwhile having hardware
support specialized for just that. In the past, one has made Lisp
machines, but they did not catch on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
But there are FPUs and GPUs, and the latter have evolved as to in
effect becoming extra processors (CPUs). So perhaps the future may see
a TPU (text processor unit) :-).
Hans
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