9fans archive / 1999 / 01 / 34 /    prev next

From: presotto@pla... presotto@pla...
Subject: [9fans] time size
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 22:35:11 -0500

Not nearly agressive enough.  Radix 50 is the only way
to go for characters.  Forget all this upper/lower case goo
not to mention unicode.  50 characters are enough for real
programmers.

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Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 19:00:20 -0800 (PST)
From: Stuart Friedberg <stuartf@seq...>
Message-Id: <199901210300.TAA21921@eng...>
To: 9fans@cse...
Subject: Re: [9fans] time size
Newsgroups: comp.os.plan9
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In article <1E485299309FD211A2100090271E27A4142D04@sym...> you write:
>Hey! Leave off PDP-10s. They had 9 bit chars.

They had any size chars you wanted from 1 to 36, but some char sizes
produced a lot of internal fragmentation.  The most efficient sizes were
 1 (36/word),
 2 (18/word),
 3 (12/word),
 4 ( 9/word),
 5 ( 7/word + 1 bit),
 6 ( 6/word),
 7 ( 5/word + 1 bit),
 8 ( 4/word + 4 bits), 
12 ( 3/word), and
18 ( 2/word),

Nine-bit characters were an especially wasteful size, as you could
only get three per word.  Might as well use 12-bit chars.

The "7-bit char plus 1 bit to indicate a line number" was probably the
most common, although the 6BIT representation was used a lot in the
systems code...

Stu Friedberg (stuartf@seq...)