Ray Weisling went to extraordinary lengths to fit his code and all the
words into very limited memory. Today, because memory is plentiful and
cheap, one would simply create a large table of all FLW, each word using
4 bytes. It would be so simple.
But instead he resorted to bit tricks. For example he created an
alphabet consisting of only 16 letters (not 26). That way a single
letter would use not 8, or 5, but just 4 bits. Thus any 4 letter word
that was a member of that alphabet required only 16 bits to encode, a 2x
memory saving. Very clever.
By creating several different sets of 16-letter alphabets he was able to
generate almost all the words you see. The remaining few exceptions were
done with a 4 byte table. To me it looked like a massive amount of
manual work, almost like a puzzle, but that's what you did as an
embedded programmer in the 90's when literally every byte counted.
I've seen the source code. It might be on the web, I don't know. Ray hit
hard times (again) in 2013; we exchanged a lot of Nixie email that year;
he sold me his personal FLW and GEEK clock to cover bills. He died not
that long after. His clocks, of course, live on and work perfectly.
/tvb
www.LeapSecond.com
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