On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 03:40, Andrew Coppin <andrewcop...@btinternet.com>wrote:
> I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits >> class allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want >> some way to know how many bits you need to keep? >> >> I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're doing it >> in your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong. (The fixed >> size version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes that need >> to be thought out beforehand.) >> > > If you're doing, say, cryptography, then thousand-bit random integers that > need to be serialised are fairly common... Sure, and there are encodings that let you do this without needing bitSize (BER). You need a word count, but that's usually part of the structure holding the integer. -- brandon s allbery allber...@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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