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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Subject: Re: Why Freemacs uses the 8th bit.
Message-ID: <1991Jun23.195524.27037@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
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Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
References: <1991Jun23.174824.21869@rock.concert.net> <NELSON.91Jun19110054@sun.clarkson.edu> <3287@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <NELSON.91Jun22232751@sun.clarkson.edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1991 19:55:24 GMT
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In article <1991Jun23.174824.21869@rock.concert.net> boyd@cs.unca.edu (Mark Boyd) writes:
>This discussion of why freemacs uses the 8th bit for meta characters
>reminded me of the file size limit in MicroEmacs. On a IBM PC clone
>with 550,000 bytes of memory available, MicroEmacs 3.10 will load about
>200,000 characters. The executable takes about 150K of memory, so that
>leaves about 400,000 bytes for the buffer. All of these numbers are
>approximate, but they do show the dramatic effect of 16 bits per
>character.
>
On my 8 megabyte PC, with about 6.3 free, MicroEmacs 3.10 will
edit a 4.5 megabyte file. So it uses appreciably less than 2 bytes
of storage per character.

Doug McDonald