Re: Shift Confusion

[Steve Holden]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:22:59 -0000, "Richard Brodie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:

"John Machin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Essentially, it should be possible to use a 'packed string' format in
Python, where as long as the characters you're sending are in the ASCII
range 0 to 127, two will fit in a byte.
It should be possible, but only in a realm where phlogiston and
perpetual motion machines exist.
alt.sys.pdp10 ?
    Closest thing I know of to what is being attempted is DEC's
RAD-50; but that was essentially just uppercase A..Z, 0..9, and a few
punctuation marks, and packed three of them into two bytes.
Another code it used was known as SIXBIT, allowing 64 different 
characters. IIRC it could cope with letters, digits and a bunch of 
punctuation - see

  http://nemesis.lonestar.org/reference/telecom/codes/sixbit.html
The DECSystem-10 used a 3-6 bit word, so you could get six sixbit 
characters to a word. In ASCII you could only get four (or, if you threw 
the parity bit away, five) characters to a word.

While its character-handling instructions weren't, as I recall, unique 
in the industry, the DECSystem-10 remains the only hardware I ever got 
to use that had instructions to handle variable byte sizes.

regards
 Steve
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