The PDP-10 had arbitrarily sized byte pointers! Did anybody ever implement a C compiler on that hardware?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3153141/defining-a-byte-in-c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit

As DIGEX teased the VAX weenies at DECUS:

“If you’re not playing with 36 bits, you’re not playing with a full DEC!"

-Don

2.12. Byte Instructions

In the PDP-10 a "byte" is some number of contiguous bits within one word.  A
byte pointer is a word that describes the byte.  There are three parts to the
description of a byte: the word (i.e., address) in which the byte occurs, the
position of the byte within the word, and the length of the byte.

A byte pointer has the following format:


   Bit     000000 000011 1 1 1111 112222222222333333
 Position  012345 678901 2 3 4567 890123456789012345
           _________________________________________
          |      |      | | |    |                  |
          | POS  | SIZE |U|I| X  |        Y         |
          |______|______|_|_|____|__________________|

   - POS is the byte position: the number of bits remaining in the word
     to the right of the byte.

   - SIZE is the byte size in bits.

   - The U field is reserved for future use and must be zero.

   - I, X, and Y are the same as in an instruction.