this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Could a kind soul ELI5 this? Well, maybe ELI8. I did quite a bit of programming in the 90-00s as part of my job, although nowadays I'm more of a script kiddie.
A boolean value only needs 1 bit (on or off) for true or false. However the smallest bit of addressable memory is a byte (8 bits) hence 7 are technically wasted.
For low memory devices you could instead store 8 different Boolean values in one single byte by using bit masking instead