On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, at 2:52pm, Bill Freeman wrote: > The description is close. Radix 50 actually allows you to get three > characters into a 16 bit word (40*40*40 <= 65536), or 6 into a 32 bit > word.
Ya know, I thought a gain of only one character (five characters, vs the four 8-bit bytes in a 32-bit word) seemed too small, but I didn't actually do the math. Hypothesis: Since "creat" is a system call, and system calls are often implemented "behind the scenes" by functions with an underscore prefix (i.e., "_creat"), that might explain where the sixth character went. This debate only goes to show why Ken Thompson might well believe that the biggest mistake he made was spelling "creat" without the trailing "e". :-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss