[9fans] time size

[9fans] time size

[Nigel]

>We could always bring back pdp10's and their 36 bit ints.

Were you FISHing for a flame there?  I think you got a....
Nibble.  And maybe four bytes.

Hey! Leave off PDP-10s. They had 9 bit chars. We might never have needed
Unicode.

[9fans] time size

[Dan]

On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 01:05:36PM -0500, presotto@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> I used to be DEC field service for 10's and 20's.

Wow, do you throw rocks at kids who come to your house
on Halloween?

	- Dan C.

:-)  (I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist.  I'll knock
out the off-topic posts now...)

[9fans] time size

[presotto]

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@sequent.com>
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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] time size
Newsgroups: comp.os.plan9
In-Reply-To: <1E485299309FD211A2100090271E27A4142D04@symnt3.Cadence.COM>
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In article <1E485299309FD211A2100090271E27A4142D04@symnt3.Cadence.COM> 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@sequent.com)

[9fans] time size

[Stuart]

In article <1E485299309FD211A2100090271E27A4142D04@symnt3.Cadence.COM> 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@sequent.com)

[9fans] time size

[presotto]

I used to be DEC field service for 10's and 20's.

[9fans] time size

[Dan]

In article <199901141623.LAA26240@cse.psu.edu> you write:
>I'ld rather go to long long though its more painful. That way,
>as dmr points out, dates before the epoch are still representable
>as negative numbers.  Going to ulong makes a good chunk of my
>life unrepresentable.  Of course, I'll be dead by 2038 and I don't
>have any kids so what do I care...

What, you're that old?

>We could always bring back pdp10's and their 36 bit ints.

Were you FISHing for a flame there?  I think you got a....
Nibble.  And maybe four bytes.

	- Dan C.

[9fans] time size

[presotto]

I'ld rather go to long long though its more painful. That way,
as dmr points out, dates before the epoch are still representable
as negative numbers.  Going to ulong makes a good chunk of my
life unrepresentable.  Of course, I'll be dead by 2038 and I don't
have any kids so what do I care...

We could always bring back pdp10's and their 36 bit ints.