Re: [SLUG] Numeric Storage Format

From: Eben King (eben01@verizon.net)
Date: Fri Dec 29 2006 - 02:05:18 EST

On Fri, 29 Dec 2006, Paul M Foster wrote:

> Folks:
>
> Some of you must know the answer to this. I'm working with an arbitrary
> precision library, and the fellow who wrote it is storing values in an array
> of characters. Within each "character" is essentially a binary number from 0
> - 99. This is a C library, so if you had a number like 57 and you wanted to
> store it (and assuming you had the number as a string) you'd store it like:
>
> nstr = "57";
> ch = nstr[0] - '0';
> number = 10 * ch + nstr[1] - '0';

So in memory it'd be '5' '7' NUL = 0x35 0x37 0x00, right?

I did that, in an arbitrary-precision library I wrote. BCD would have been
half the size, but slower to extract and store. More complicated too, which
was of greater concern, given my coding skills.

> Okay, now after all the explanation, what is this storage format *called*?
> It's not BCD, and it's not packed decimal. I'd like to know what it's called,
> so I can look up references on it.

I'd call it "stored as an ASCII string" m'self, but ICBW. 

-- 
-eben     QebWenE01R@vTerYizUonI.nOetP     royalty.no-ip.org:81

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
     and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
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