Possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
The reason to have a distinction between bits and bytes in the first place is so that you can have a unit of addressing that is different from the smallest unit of information.<p>But what would we lose if we just got rid of the notion of bytes and just let every bit be addressable?<p>To start, we'd still be able to fit the entire address space into a 64-bit pointer. The maximum address space would merely be reduced from 16 exabytes to 2 exabytes.<p>I presume there's some efficiency reason why we can't address bits in the first place. How much does that still apply? I admit, I'd just rather live in a world where I don't have to think about alignment or padding ever again. :P