3 ms·
Sorry, I wasn't clear about the statement I was making. You are of course right about being able to store text consisting of multiple characters from an N-bit c
by munchbunny 8y ago
Sorry, I wasn't clear about the statement I was making. You are of course right about being able to store text consisting of multiple characters from an N-bit charset at much less than N bits per character.
What I meant was that the single-character representation isn't going to go below N bits per character if there are at least 2^N unique characters.
- jmiserez 8y agoIf you want them all to have the same length, no. But even in practice this is not the case anymore, e.g. the most common encoding UTF-8 uses 8 bits for the ASCII characters and then 16/24/32 bits for the lesser used code points. And there are some exotic UTF-5/6/7 variants as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Unicode_encodings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Unicode_encoding...