this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Wait till you here about every ascii letter. . .

[–] answersplease77@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

ASCII was originally a 7-bit standard. If you type in ASCII on an 8-bit system, every leading bit is always 0.

(Edited to specify context)

At least ASCII is forward compatible with UTF-8

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[–] houseofleft@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Ascii needs seven bits, but is almost always encoded as bytes, so every ascii letter has a throwaway bit.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Let's store the boolean there then!!

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[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago

We need to be able to express 0 and 1 as integers so that functionality is just being overloaded to express another concept.

Wait until the person who made this meme finds out about how many bits are being wasted on modern CPU architectures. 7 is the minimum possible wasted bits but it would be 31 on every modern computer (even 64b machines since they default to 32b ints).

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago

This guy never coded in KEIL C on an 8051 architecture. They actually use bit addressable RAM for booleans. And if you set the compiler to pass function parameters in registers, it uses the carry flag for the first bit or bool type parameter.

[–] ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I swore I read that mysql dbs will store multiple bools in a row as bit maps in one byte. I can't prove it though

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[–] visnae@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

3GPP has an interesting way of serialising bools on the wire with ASN.1

NULL OPTIONAL

meaning only the type would be stored if true, otherwise it won't be set at all

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[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago

Wait till you realise the size of SSD sectors

[–] Iceblade02@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

...or you can be coding assembler - it's all just bits to me

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

pragma(pack) {

int a:1, b:1, ... h:1;

}

IIRC.

[–] ZeroGravitas@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago

7 Shades of Truth

[–] kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Redundancy is nice in the event of bitflip errors

[–] MNByChoice@midwest.social 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Is the redundancy used for bools? I mean in actual practice.

[–] kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago

iunno ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I mean is it really a waste? What's minimum amount of bits most CPUs read in one cycle.

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[–] Amberskin@europe.pub 4 points 3 weeks ago

Pl/1 did it right:

Dcl 1 mybools, 3 bool1 bit(1) unaligned, 3 bool2 bit(1) unaligned, … 3 bool8 bit(1) unaligned;

All eight bools are in the same byte.

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