3 ms·
Spoiler: Essentially the author is talking about a custom encoding. This is something I always try to impress to other engineers. Everything is just an encodin
by maerF0x0 5y ago
Spoiler: Essentially the author is talking about a custom encoding.
This is something I always try to impress to other engineers. Everything is just an encoding to binary. How we interpret it is entirely up to us. Even the fact that we choose to use 8 bits as a grouping.
Often this leads to much more efficient implementations...
Of course only do it where/when it matters.
- s_dev 5y agoOld school vending machines use 9 bit bytes. In case anyone was looking for a example.
- perl4ever 5y agoThe IBM 704 used 6 bit bytes (and 36 bit words). A number of people have toyed with ternary (commonly the digits are -1, 0, and +1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1498715 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1498715
- d21d3q 5y agoBut still data is stored in 8 bits. 9th bit holds information whether "byte" contains slave address or frame data. so that when slave listens and if it receives byte with 9th bit set and the rest is it's own address, then it can start to interpret following bytes. Otherwise it can ignore following data. Maybe that comment is not so relevant to thread, but one may be curious how it works.
- goldenkey 5y agoBinary is what we use on computers. It can encode anything but not always optimally. A quark's color for instance, is ternary. You'd probably benefit from reading about fractional bit encodings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27698522
- maerF0x0 5y agoWhoa . That's pretty cool, TIL, thank you!
- perl4ever 5y agoDonald Knuth proposed a "a positional numeral system whose radix is an imaginary...or complex number": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex-base_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex-base_system
- goldenkey 5y agoWhoa, interesting...