[Haskell-cafe] bitSize

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 06:57, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>wrote:

> On 26/08/2011 10:51 PM, Steve Schafer wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:30:02 +0100, you wrote:
>>
>>> You wouldn't want to know how many bits you need to store on disk to
>>> reliably recreate the value?
>>>
>>
>> I can't say that I have cared about that sort of thing in a very long
>> time. Bits are rather cheap these days. I store data on disk, and the
>> space it occupies is whatever it is; I don't worry about it.
>>
>
> I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits class
> allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want some way to know
> how many bits you need to keep?
>

I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're doing it in
your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong.  (The fixed size
version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes that need to be
thought out beforehand.)

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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