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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I heard about nibbles right at the beginning and then promptly forgot them. I even remember thinking that the word was silly. But it set me up for a very nice epiphany the first time I saw bytes written as hex and played a part in my instantly grasping that.

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I'd be curious to poll people's experiences, but, I can say that I had never heard the term until today and I've known this stuff for a number of years.

And it sounds silly and adds nothing. That too.

(edit: my education on this stuff was in the 00's. Sounds like it was more common in the 80s. I'd definitely support obsoleting the term entirely now, though! It adds unnecessary complexity.)

I first read nybble/nibble in a book in the late 80s when I was a kid.

I don't think I read or heard about it again for over a decade. It's never sounded silly to me, or at least no more silly than "byte", and it's at least slightly useful to explain converting hex.

I suppose that nybbles are not encountered much now due to the fact that most systems are byte-oriented, but back when 4 and 8-bit CPUs were far more common relative to bigger systems, the term appeared quite often in documentation - especially when talking about BCD formats.

While I haven't heard or thought about the term in years, I do remember it from learning about computers in the 80's. I guess it made more sense back in the days when binary math and bit twiddling where a more common technique and keeping close track of the number of bits you where using was important.

My algorithms teacher (3rd year paper) mentioned them when doing a few lectures on information theory, data compression and encoding, then set an assignment on implementing LZW or LZ78 with a bit-packer (and the inverse). The spec allowed you to either compress via bytes or nibbles.

That was last year, I also got the impression that he liked to fill likely gaps that he could do with small detours.

It's yet another term that you can get by without knowing, and you'll probably be fine. But understanding why it's relevant to even have a word for it is the important insight. We should just as soon obsolete the term flip-flop.

> We should just as soon obsolete the term flip-flop

And replace it with what? Bistable multivibrator?

0b11110000 == 0xF0 So two hexadecimal digits represent a byte. Likewise, one hex digit represents a nibble. I'm much more in favor of deprecating WORD as a synonym for byte

> I'm much more in favor of deprecating WORD as a synonym for byte

Its not a synonym for byte. In modern systems, a word is typically 4 or 8 bytes.

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