On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Bill Fairchild <[email protected]> wrote:
> I couldn't think of a "useful" reason for such code either, other than > perhaps as a teaching exercise. But I was going to reply "Who cares what the > value of it is? Why not just answer the original question? A long time ago > someone wondered "What's the use of this strange thing that always points in > the same direction if we put it on top of a piece of wood so it will float on > water? It's no good. Let's throw it overboard." I too appreciate the opportunity to learn. It would also be interesting to hear about possible performance implications... Such ideas often make me think (and ask) about where to apply the new knowledge, or maybe just to learn more. In this case I realized that the exact comparison might be affected by code page. So you would compare one byte with the original, and the others with each other. That made sense to me since we don't have another easy way to compare a string with a character (or do we)? > Then Frank Ramaekers' reply reminded me that I, too, have written code to > replace 16 (or hundreds, or thousands, of) consecutive identical bytes with > the one phrase "Same as above." And I have done so more than once. But that would involve comparing two strings, rather than a string with a character? I would be pretty annoyed reading a dump and get portions omitted with "... these 32 byte are all the same, guess what they are..." | Rob
