Redundancy is nice in the event of bitflip errors
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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7 Shades of Truth
...or you can be coding assembler - it's all just bits to me
pragma(pack) {
int a:1, b:1, ... h:1;
}
IIRC.
I mean is it really a waste? What's minimum amount of bits most CPUs read in one cycle.
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(2 replies)
Pl/1 did it right:
Dcl 1 mybools, 3 bool1 bit(1) unaligned, 3 bool2 bit(1) unaligned, … 3 bool8 bit(1) unaligned;
All eight bools are in the same byte.
Could a kind soul ELI5 this? Well, maybe ELI8. I did quite a bit of programming in the 90-00s as part of my job, although nowadays I'm more of a script kiddie.
A boolean value only needs 1 bit (on or off) for true or false. However the smallest bit of addressable memory is a byte (8 bits) hence 7 are technically wasted.
For low memory devices you could instead store 8 different Boolean values in one single byte by using bit masking instead
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Now store the numbers (array):
0 0 0 1 0 1 1 2
think 8 bytes???
Does anybody ever figure in parity when comparing bit sizes and all that jazz or are we only ever concerned with storage space?
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