On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 1:19 PM, fireplace_tea <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > I'm a little confused on the amount of memory each variable type takes > up in RAM. I understand about bits and bytes and ASCII. I.E. If you > type in DOG each letter is one byte, thus the entire word DOG is three > bytes. If each character is one byte how is it that a long int > variable type that can be up to 10 bytes in length only take up 4 > bytes of memory?
Because the internal representation is only 4 bytes in length, not 10. They aren't stored as literal strings. (The decimal representation will generally be longer however.) Go back to your first example - the letters D, O and G. D, in ASCII, is represented by the number 66 in decimal, 0x44 in hex, 0104 in octal and 0b01000100 in binary. All are 1 byte in length. I think you need to read up on the (general) internal representation of integers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system -- PJH http://shabbleland.myminicity.com/sec
