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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: Rules for Representation of Subtypes
Date: 1996/10/01
Message-ID: <DyMA6y.4w3@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 186548206
references: <dewar.844014110@schonberg> <52oi3v$din@mill.gdls.com>
 <1996Oct1.125614.1@eisner>
organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-01T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <1996Oct1.125614.1@eisner>,
Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> wrote:
>Will the demand for Unicode support make 16 bits the typical
>size of a Storage Unit ?  Or will egalitarian support for
>those Korean dialects drive it to 32 bits ?

No.  To efficiently handle unicode, you need to do some sort of packing.
Even with cheap memory, space optimization matters, because space
optimization implies speed optimization when using caches and paging to
disks.

I suspect 8-bit bytes will be around for a long time, since there's a
lot of C code that depends on it.  I also suspect that word sizes will
be powers of 2 for a long time.  Except for the minor factor of existing
software, today's 64-bit machines would be either 64-bit-addressable, or
1-bit-addressable, methinks.

- Bob