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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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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