At 04:31 PM 12/29/00 +0000, David Mitchell wrote:
>The current thread about bigints and overflows and stuff has given me
>a thought:
>
>A few of the bits in the flags word of an SV should be reserved as
>part of the payload (as opposed to being generic SV flags), so a particular
>SV type can make whatever internal use it likes of them. Ie the
>payload area of an SV increases from 8 bytes or whatever to 8 bytes + a few
>bits. This would be particualarly handy where a particular type fits directly
>into the payload area (ie doesnt need to store a pointer to further
>data), but which requires just one or two extra bits of status (eg a aign
>bit for some interger type ???).
Well, we're considering having the base variable structure have spots for
an int, float, and pointer in it, so specialty types could go co-opt some
of those. I'd rather not have the generic flag field used for specific type
info--while we don't have many at the moment, flag bits tend to be rather
precious.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
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