Comment by WalterBright

D made a great leap forward with the following:

1. bytes are 8 bits

2. shorts are 16 bits

3. ints are 32 bits

4. longs are 64 bits

5. arithmetic is 2's complement

6. IEEE floating point

and a big chunk of wasted time trying to abstract these away and getting it wrong anyway was saved. Millions of people cried out in relief!

Oh, and Unicode was the character set. Not EBCDIC, RADIX-50, etc.