<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 03:40, Andrew Coppin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andrewcoppin@btinternet.com">andrewcoppin@btinternet.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits<br>
class allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want<br>
some way to know how many bits you need to keep?<br>
<br>
I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're doing it<br>
in your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong. (The fixed<br>
size version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes that need<br>
to be thought out beforehand.)<br>
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If you're doing, say, cryptography, then thousand-bit random integers that need to be serialised are fairly common...</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Sure, and there are encodings that let you do this without needing bitSize (BER). You need a word count, but that's usually part of the structure holding the integer.</div>
</div><div><br></div>-- <br>brandon s allbery <a href="mailto:allbery.b@gmail.com" target="_blank">allbery.b@gmail.com</a><br>wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms<br>
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