Re: Representing / Storing Text As a Unique Number Composed Of Prime Products

In article <1123914717.981488.54560@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "rer" <reriker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I should also clarify that storing text was meant to refer to storing
> text as data for a computer. If you store text as Extended ASCII, it
> requires 8 bits. If you store it as Unicode, it requires 16 bits.
> Since most operating systems are 32 bits or 64 bits, I am not exactly
> sure how text is stored on these systems. That is, how is a single
> letter stored on such a system? On a 32 bit system, would a single
> text letter be stored in a single 32 bit address space? How about on a
> 64 bit system?

Some miscomprehensions here. I have no idea what "Extended ASCII" is.
But you are confusing what is going on in the memory of the processor
and what is going on on the hard disk. The two are different, and have
assigned different amounts of bits assigned to the basic "units" that
can be read and written to and from the device. Moreover, when you use
a single character (or a file containing a single character) that will
possibly occupy a single basic unit, when you use strings of multiple
characters, they will most likely use much less than a basic unit for
each single character. Also, when you store as Unicode in the RTF8
encoding, all your English text will only use 8 bits per character.
And finally, there has been done a large amount of research on text
compression. To do this in the memory of the processor is not a good
idea, it makes sense only when you write files on HD. A good start
for reading (and that is about where compression started) is looking
up texts about "Huffman encoding".
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