[fabriceleal]

> Okay, you also get some obscure information like whether there were an even or odd number of 1 bits in the bottom 8 bits of result, but that’s hardly useful nowadays.

I'm honestly curious, was it ever useful, or is it just an expression?

[flohofwoe]

The parity flag goes all the way back to the Intel 8080 and Z80 (gosh, even the Intel 4004 it seems [2]) and AFAIK was used for error detection when reading data from IO devices [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit

[2] https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hackster.io%2FMayu...

[rot13xor]

Parity is cheap to calculate in hardware but much more expensive to do purely in software. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25707130/what-is-the-pur...