I'm drowning in PHP
Jonathan McKeown
jonathan at hst.org.za
Tue May 15 14:17:56 BST 2007
On Tuesday 15 May 2007 14:56, David Cantrell wrote:
> Anyway, if you want to be efficient, you don't use a marker character,
> you use a marker bit. Just set the high bit of the last character to 1
> like we used to in the good old days when men were men and computers had
> cassette players.
Yes. On the Commodore PET the BASIC keywords were stored in a lookup table
using this technique, and since shifted letters had the high bit set, you
could abbreviate keywords by shifting:
fO i=1 to 100 sT 5: ? i: nE
(Didn't save anything but typing time: they were stored as one-byte tokens
anyway AFAIR).
Jonathan
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