This is a neat perspective. I’ve heard conversation on how working with different programming languages affects how you code (“learn Haskell, it’ll make you think more functionally!”) but for some reason I never connected it to the linguistic side of things.
I remember learning about the effects of language on cognition in a psychology course I took a while ago, it’s interesting to think about how that could apply more broadly.
Could you elaborate on the reasoning behind using byte length instead of bit length?
Most of the time when I use fixed-width int types I’m trying to create guarantees for bitwise operators. From my perspective I feel like it therefore makes the most sense to name types on a per-bit level.
We almost always talk in bytes. When trying to reason about alignment it's bytes, when reading a serial IO from a file it's bytes. I hardly ever think in bits and when I do, I think in hex not decimal.
I also like that it makes all the type names the same width (notably U1/U2 vs u8/u16).
I remember learning about the effects of language on cognition in a psychology course I took a while ago, it’s interesting to think about how that could apply more broadly.