D made a great leap forward with the following:
1. bytes are 8 bits
2. shorts are 16 bits
3. ints are 32 bits
4. longs are 64 bits
5. arithmetic is 2's complement
6. IEEE floating point
and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!
Oh, and Unicode was the character set. Not EBCDIC, RADIX-50, etc.
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"1. bytes are 8 bits"
How big is a bit?
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Yeah, this is something Java got right as well. It got "unsigned" wrong, but it got standardizing primitive bits correct
byte = 8 bits
short = 16
int = 32
long = 64
float = 32 bit IEEE
double = 64 bit IEEE
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