On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 08:59:58PM +0100, Shane Dempsey wrote:
> Also ' : '
> ( as previously stated )
> is definitely non-standard and pretty damn horrible. When
> space gets that tight you should just right the fscking thing in
> assembler.
It's not simply a space issue. Whatever about disk space being
cheap, bandwidth isn't in a lot of cases. I don't think you'd
like it if all the option and flag bits in your TCP and IP headers
took up one byte each...
Not to mention dealing with hardware. No hardware designer is
going to waste bus bandwidth and I/O address space by dedicating
whole bytes (or larger) to fields that can be held in a single
bit. (Says me while I'm editing a header file in another xterm
with definitions for old VAX serial I/O chips...)
Later,
Kenn
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