[erlang-questions] Bit Syntax and compiler Erlang/OTP R21.1

[Valentin Micic]

> On 21 Aug 2019, at 02:06, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Valentin Micic wrote
>    
> :> If you cannot write 17 loose bits to a file, or,
> :> better yet, if you cannot send 13 loose bits over a socket,
> :> one has to wonder how useful are non-aligned bitstrings
> 
> This is a very odd thing to say.  PL/I has had bit strings
> since about 1965.  Common Lisp has bit strings.  Some Scheme
> implementations have bit strings.  APL has bit arrays of any
> size and shape.  SQL 92 had BIT(n) and BIT(n) VARYING just
> like PL/I -- surprise surprise -- but SQL 2003 dropped them,
> while Postgres still supports them.  Ada has bit strings,
> in the guise of packed arrays of Boolean, replacing Pascal's
> sets (which are fixed size bit strings). Do I need to point
> to bit string support in Java and C#?
> 
> You may not be able to send 13 loose bits over a socket, but
> you *can* have a 13-bit field in a packet, and why should it
> be hard to construct that 13-bit field or to pack it? 


Well, as I’ve said, I never had anything against 13-bit field in packet… I was struggling to find a situation where one would benefit from being able to write <<Field:13>> instead of <<Field:13, _:3>>, that is — until Daniel Szoboszlay mentioned compression. Another example from my direct experience (oh irony), which came back to my mind only after Daniels observation,  is 7-bit character encoding used by SMS… this would have been way, way easier to implement using bitstrings.

I’ve seen the light, thank you.
Life moves on.
 
V/

> 

> And of
> course if you are running Erlang on a Raspberry Pi, you can
> send or receive a message of *any* number of bits through the
> Pi's GPIO pins (with the aid of a NIF).
> 

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