Re: Temporal database - no end date

On Jan 23, 4:32 am, Frank Hamersley <terabitemigh..._at_bigpond.com> wrote:
> Marshall wrote:[..]
>
> > Another example of dividing the undividable:
>
> > I can't think of anything more indivisible than the bit. Can't
> > have less than a bit, can you? I mean, what could a third
> > of a bit even mean? The very idea is ridiculous. And yet...
>
> > I used to work on a system that had a character encoding
> > that used 5 1/3 bits per character. That's right: five and
> > one third bits for each character. 2^5.333 ~= 40.32;
> > the character set consisted of 40 characters, each consuming
> > about 5 1/3 bits. If you had 3 characters, that was 16 bits.
> > 5 1/3 * 3 = 16.
>
> OK - back it with enough detail to dispell all my concerns about the
> veracity of your claim. And please do not resort to averages.

You have to actually express some concerns before I can dispel them. I can't just pluck them out of your mind after holding an envelope up to my forehead. Would it help you to figure out how it worked if I said that strings were always a multiple of 2 bytes in length?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODCOMP

They used to have some of them at Lawrence Berkeley Labs where I worked in the early eighties.

Oh, hell: just imagine three base-40 digits packed in to a 16 bit quantity. Fits nicely: 40*40*40 = 64000, not much left over at all. Each character consumes five and one third bits.

Marshall Received on Tue Jan 23 2007 - 09:46:38 CST