From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-11T03:46:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Immediate values

ts wrote:

> F> Hm, why not 2 ** 24 - 1? (Is one bit used for a special purpose or am I 
> F> overlooking something?)
> 
>  It must make the transformation ID ==> Symbol, Symbol ==> ID and if I'm
>  right it lost a bit ("sign" bit)
> 
>  This give one free bit, if one day you want to hack ruby :-)

Hmmm, maybe this is can one day be used for representing Characters in 
an efficient way. 0 .. 8388607 might not be full Unicode range, but it 
would be a nifty optimization for the UCS2 space at least.

Now I'm only wondering if the number of Symbols expands to 
36028797018963967 on 64 bit systems or if it is fixed independently of 
native bit width.

Thanks for your correction and explanation!