Nibbler

A Nibbler, in the context of computer science, refers to a group of four bits, or half of a byte. It is a less commonly used term than byte, but it's occasionally encountered, particularly when discussing low-level data manipulation, networking protocols, or specific hardware architectures where data may be processed or represented in units smaller than a byte.

The term "nibble" (an alternate spelling) derives from the idea that it's a "nibble" of a byte, analogous to taking a small bite out of something larger.

Because a nibbler consists of four bits, it can represent 2⁴ = 16 different values. These values are commonly represented in hexadecimal notation, where each hexadecimal digit corresponds to a single nibbler. Therefore, a single hexadecimal character (0-9, A-F) is often used to represent the data held within a nibbler.

While not as fundamental as bits or bytes, understanding the concept of a nibbler can be helpful in contexts where bit-level and byte-level operations are important, such as working with binary coded decimal (BCD) numbers, or when analyzing network packets structured in terms of half-bytes. The use of nibblers is less prevalent in modern high-level programming languages due to the emphasis on larger data types and abstract data structures.