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From: crowl@rochester.ARPA (Lawrence Crowl)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Byte order
Message-ID: <17610@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 25-Apr-86 16:21:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.17610
Posted: Fri Apr 25 16:21:47 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Apr-86 07:27:13 EDT
References: <17162@rochester.ARPA> <139200027@uiucdcsb> <17312@rochester.ARPA> <1298@mmintl.UUCP>
Reply-To: crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 23

In article <1298@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
]In article <17312@rochester.ARPA> crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
]]CHALLENGE:  Come up with a scheme for representing numbers, and a sorting
]]scheme in which numbers sort naturally.  Your scheme must deal with variable
]]length character strings and variable size numbers.  That is, you cannot
]]require strings to be padded with nulls, or numbers to be padded with zeros.
]
]Basically, you use a unary notation (pure or modified) to indicate how long
]the number is, and the number follows.  Using the scheme above, 257 would
]be ZZZ257.  One and a half would be Z15.  This is essentially floating point
]notation. ...  This has to be modified a bit to deal with negative numbers. ...
]Also, for negative numbers, the digits should be in (9's) complement form. ...
]This can of course be done somewhat better.  A higher radix can be used, and
]the exponent encoding can be further optimized.  But the point is to describe
]the approach, not to work out all the details.

This seems good to me.  If there are no radical alternatives, lets close the
issue.
-- 

Lawrence Crowl             716-275-5766        University of Rochester
                                               Computer Science Department
...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl    Rochester, New York,  14627