> Correct, and in fact on the Alpha you cannot even load a half-word
> (16-bits) or (8-bit) quantity by itself into a register unless you
> have a very recent Alpha cpu.
>
> The size of this "word" is whatever the architecture natural word
> size is, 64-bits on sparc64/alpha and 32-bit on most others.
On the Alpha, a "word" is 16 bits! You can not load or store a word
on the original Alpha. You must use double words ("dword") and quad
words ("qword") only.
I'd guess Digital kept PDP-11 terms for the VAX, and just kept them
for the Alpha as well. They shouldn't use "word" that way of course,
since a proper word is 36 bits. You can store 5 ASCII characters in
a machine word, with one bit left over. According to typists, that
is a word. The B library provides the char() and lchar() functions...
Anyway, "word" is a term we'd best avoid.
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