qbradq wrote:
Bottom line is, it don't matter. A word is 16 bits. Deal :lol:
Generally I agree, but I would say: on the 6502, a word is 16 bits. Meaning: "the term 'word' refers to something that's 16 bits in size".
That's my entire point: it's utter nonsense to use the word "word" to describe common register sizes on a CPU. As such, that Wikipedia page should die in a fire. It's purely a terminology thing, absolutely, but anyone who has written assembly on a multitude of architectures knows exactly what "word" means with regards to that architecture. That's why I preceded my statement in my above paragraph with "on the 6502...."
Yes, I'm quite aware that non-6502 architectures may use the term "word" to describe a varying number of bits (16/32/64) depending on what operational mode it's in (think protected mode or x64). But usually assembly programmers say "word" to mean 16 bits, "dword" to represent 32-bit, and "qword" to represent 64-bit. Hey look,
some other bastard knows this too. And anyone familiar with this god-awful architecture knows that if another engineer says "yeah blah blah, it's going to be a word, blah blah" and isn't precise in what he/she says, the response will always be "wait, when you say 'word' what exact size are you talking about here?" followed by a discussion that's reminiscent of Of course,
this guy beautifully contradicts himself ("I use word to refer to 32-bits", then in his own assembly code uses DWORD because per Intel's architecture HE HAS TO.
Derpdederp alert).
So to recap: the term "word" on 6502 refers to 16 bits. But it may not matter much since
we're all dead this weekend.
I guess we could have a big discussion about what "byte" actually means too, since on
some (ancient) architectures (PDP) a byte is 6 or 7 bits. And hey, did you know that in
some PIC compilers "int" is 16 bits? Yeah, that makes for lots of fun, believe me. *grunts*
Werd (word).