3 ms·

It's pretty cool and all but what are the uses for this? What set of 4 un ordered 5-bit numbers would i need to store that I couldn't just store as 3 bytes? I w

It's pretty cool and all but what are the uses for this? What set of 4 un ordered 5-bit numbers would i need to store that I couldn't just store as 3 bytes? I waste only 4 bits while preserving the order if need be of the values I'm storing. I can think of a very very small few occasions 4 bits would matter over order but nothing realistic. Again It's a cool trick and I'm not trying to be a dick about it. I like cool little tricks like this even if there's no purpose. I'm honestly curious about some realistic use cases for this or some variation of this with larger numbers.

joshuak 9y ago
It's 4 5-bit values, not 5 4-bit values. 5-bits is enough to enumerate each bit in a 32-bit bitfield. This means for any application that might set 4 or fewer flags out of a possible 32 need only use a 16-bit bitfield. As I said in another comment I just tested this with a 32-bit hash array mapped trie, and it would result in a significant reduction in the storage overhead of the trie (which is already more efficient than typical hash tables for map like data structures).