I .... okay, my mind is blown. It absolutely says that, and https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/types adds "this allows the extreme case in which bytes are sized 64 bits, all types (including char) are 64 bits wide, and sizeof returns 1 for every type."

So that scaling factor is placed into CHAR_BIT, and would be 64 on that DSP compiler.

> An object shall have its stored value accessed only by an lvalue that has one of the following types:

Yes, my confusion comes down to my confusion of what "byte" means in the C spec.

Thank you for your time in pointing this out.

Yeah, it's one of those things that is not exactly intuitive if you didn't already know about it. The menagerie of other byte-ish-sized types added in recent versions of C and C++ probably doesn't help either.

Bit of a (not so?) fun fact: char* being a universal alias can lead to some potentially unexpected slowdowns [0], especially if the char* bit is behind a typedef.

[0]: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/08/26/vector-inc.htm...