[REBOL] Re: Temporal data [was is REBOL OO]
From: SunandaDH:aol at: 14-Jan-2004 13:21
Hi Gabriele,
> Well, since we're talking 356 bits, maybe you'll forgive me
> wasting some memory.
>
> >> bitmap: "000110101000111111100101001111111" ;... till 356 days
> == "000110101000111111100101001111111"
> >> available?: func [bitmap cons] [if bitmap: find bitmap head insert/dup
> clear "" 1 cons [index? bitmap]]
Thanks for the reply. That's a neat bit of lateral thinking!
You correctly spotted that Puzzle 2 was a trick question to highlight the
inadequacies of using REBOL's bitmaps for binary strings longer than 32 octets --
so that some other sort of representation was needed.
A "character bitmap" (to coin a term) of the sort you use, obviously lifts a
binary string into a realm in which various standard REBOL operations are
possible -- like finding the longest sequence of 1s, reversing the string etc. And
it makes possible things that REBOL doesn't properly support like shift/left
or rotate/right
But it makes it much harder (I won't say impossible, or someone will email in
a char-xor function) to do boolean operations.
I guess a system that needs to do basic boolean operations on binary strings
could do those directly, and then unfurl (to coin another term) the binary
string into a character bitmap for those other operations. Provided furling and
unfurling was fast, it could work.
Ideally, though, REBOL would provide a wider ranger of ways to work with
bits. (Another alternative is to write the operations in C or asm and use /Pro or
/command. But that makes portability a pain)
Thanks again,
Sunanda.<