UNIX Arcana [was Re: Perl (or Unix vs. MS, actually) ]

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, at 2:52pm, Bill Freeman wrote:
> The description is close.  Radix 50 actually allows you to get three
> characters into a 16 bit word (40*40*40 <= 65536), or 6 into a 32 bit
> word.

  Ya know, I thought a gain of only one character (five characters, vs the
four 8-bit bytes in a 32-bit word) seemed too small, but I didn't actually
do the math.

  Hypothesis: Since "creat" is a system call, and system calls are often
implemented "behind the scenes" by functions with an underscore prefix
(i.e., "_creat"), that might explain where the sixth character went.

  This debate only goes to show why Ken Thompson might well believe that the
biggest mistake he made was spelling "creat" without the trailing "e".  :-)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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