Why is the smallest value that can be stored is a Byte(8bit) & not a Bit(1bit)?

Why is the smallest value that can be stored a Byte(8bit) & not a Bit(1bit) in 开发者_如何学JAVAmemory? Even booleans are stored as Bytes. Will we ever bump the smallest number to 32 or 64bits like register's on the CPU?

EDIT: To clarify as many answers seemed confused about the nature of questing. This question is about why isn't a byte 7-bit, 1-bit, 32-bit, etc (not why lower bit primitives must fit within the hardware's byte at min). Is the 8-bit byte simply historical as some hardware has 10-bit bytes for example. Or is there a mathematical reason 8-bit is ideal vs say 10-bit for general processing?

The hardware is built to read data in blocks (bytes, later words and dwords). This provides greater efficiency, than accessing individual bits, and also offers more addressing range. So most data is aligned to at least byte boundary. There exist encodings that operate with bit sequences, rather than bytes, but they are quite rare.

Nowadays the data is most often aligned to dword (32-bits) boundary anyway. Moreover, some hardware (ARM, for example), can't access misaligned multibyte variables, i.e. 16-bit word can't "cross" dword boundary - exception will be thrown.

Because computers address memory at the byte level, so anything smaller than a byte is not addressable.

The underlying methods of processor access are limited to the size of the smallest usable register. On most architectures, that size is 8 bits. You can use smaller portions of these; for instance, C has the bitfield feature in structs that will allow combining fields that only need to be certain bit lengths. Access will still require that the whole byte be read.

Some older exotic architectures actually did have different a "word size." In these machines, 10 bits might be the common size.

Lastly, processors are almost always backwards compatible. Intel, for instance, has maintained complete instruction compatibility from the 386 on up. If you take a program compiled for the 386, it will still run on an i7 processor. Changing the word size would break compatibility. So while it is possible, no manufacturer will ever do it.

Assume that we have native language that consist of 2 character such as a , b to distinguish two characters we need at least 1 bit for example 0 to represent char a and 1 to represent char b

so that if we count number of characters and special characters and symbols, there are 128 character and to distinguish one character from another, you need log2(128) = 7 bit and 8th bit for transmission