"M. Uli Kusterer" wrote:
> A "bit" chunk type sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
> we'd have to care about big-endian vs. little-endian bits. Use
> the one of the current platform, one for all stacks, or have a property to
> switch ... it's not that easy.
I'd say "network order" ;-)
> I'm not sure how a range of bits should be returned:
You already can easily convert numbers to binary form and lots of other
things. What I was thinking of was accessing any string bitwise. The
problems that come up then are that the length of a string is always a
multiple of 8 bits, but bitstrings can be of arbitrary length so you can
simply add them together. It would be a short form of binaryEn/Decode.
Say you have two bit strings s1 = "101" and s2 = "011" (note the leading zero!):
put s2 after s1 --> "101011"
set bit 3 of s1 to 0 --> "100011"
You can do the same thing by decoding the bitstring into a string of
zeros and ones and then accessing it with the char token type:
get binaryDecode("B*","30",s1) --> s1 = "0011001100110000"
put 1 into char 6 of s1 --> s1 = "0011011100110000"
get binaryEncode("B*",s1) --> "70"
And I guess this moves my request off the feature request list (if it
ever got there ;-) ... it would be a mere syntactical addon, not really
a new feature. And it proves again that most things are already "in there".
I thought I'd share it with the list, because it is a handy technique
that makes the use of MetaCard even more attractive (have you ever tried
to understand C++ code that works with bit strings?!?... especially if
they are more than 32 bit long!!!)
Regards
R�diger
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