Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> both counts of what?  Maybe we're misunderstanding each
    Scott> other here... but if you had 4-byte characters, then a
    Scott> string, normally declared in C as 'char *string' (an
    Scott> oversimplification of course), would become 'int *string',

This was exactly my point.
    Scott> at least on x86 machines (I believe that 'int' is not 4
    Scott> bytes on all architectures, right?)  The 'long double'
    Scott> thing was intended as a Humorous Exaggeration.

Count 1: wasteful.  Characters are an opaque data type; if they're 32
bits, they're ints.  Thus, not wasteful.  (OK, actually UCS-4 is 31
bits.  As Phil Collins didn't sing, so-so-so-su-mi-o.)

For practical purposes (ie, working with existing code), int is 32
bits.  Architectures with 64 bit ints do exist, of course (Alpha and I
believe UltraSparc come to mind; purging ports of the int = 32 bits
assumption is a regular complaint of Alpha programmers), and there it
would be wasteful.  Point taken.

Count 2: using doubles to represent characters.  Won't happen, chars
are integral types, and do not compare sensibly (among other things).
A Humorous Exaggeration should have borrowed a declaration from a
multi-precision int library ;-)

Aren't you glad you asked?

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