From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/49960 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Why article numbers? Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 18:44:33 -0500 Organization: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt, human pyramid? Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: <841y2jzrgm.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1044747837 7735 80.91.224.249 (8 Feb 2003 23:43:57 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 23:43:57 +0000 (UTC) Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 18hedQ-00020S-00 for ; Sun, 09 Feb 2003 00:43:48 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18heeQ-0005j1-00; Sat, 08 Feb 2003 17:44:50 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Sat, 08 Feb 2003 17:45:48 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (sclp3.sclp.com [66.230.238.2]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id RAA25816 for ; Sat, 8 Feb 2003 17:45:37 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 38996 invoked by alias); 8 Feb 2003 23:44:36 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 38991 invoked from network); 8 Feb 2003 23:44:36 -0000 Original-Received: from multivac.student.cwru.edu (HELO multivac.cwru.edu) (@129.22.96.25) by 66.230.238.6 with SMTP; 8 Feb 2003 23:44:36 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 10129 invoked by uid 500); 8 Feb 2003 23:44:55 -0000 Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's message of "Sat, 08 Feb 2003 21:38:32 +0100") Mail-Copies-To: nobody Mail-Followup-To: ding@gnus.org Original-Lines: 12 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090015 (Oort Gnus v0.15) Emacs/21.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49960 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49960 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote: > Gnus deals with groups that commonly have hundreds of thousands of > articles in them. Doing anything but integers will be too slow. If we only allow symbols, we can still use eq, assq, etc., but we still get all the benefits of using arbitrary objects as identifiers. I think the only advantage of integers over symbols is in representing large contiguous ranges. Can you give us some examples of places where compact representations are really essential? paul