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Re: bit or byte?

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 74 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 74 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Hi,

I like the idea of bit-resolution binary operations. They make
network-stack implementation, driver-writing, and graphics work much
less painful (although even without them, an adaptation to srfi-74 of
Oleg's bit-reader http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/binary-io.html#bit-reader
and some corresponding bit-writer would do very nicely in a pinch).

Sebastian Egner wrote:
> * The implementation is substantially complicated. In particular the COPY!
> operation is not an easy thing to write if it is to be efficient.

That is true; however, there are lots of Smalltalk systems that have
very refined implementations of BitBlt that could be borrowed from. A
nice side effect is that with BitBlt, you suddenly get a Smalltalk-80
like means of doing (admittedly only 1-bit) bitmapped graphics, using
these blob operations :-) (which brings Scheme kicking and screaming
into the early eighties...)

(In fact, the Smalltalk-80 design for class Bitmap is fairly good and
could perhaps be borrowed from?)

Tony