From: itsme213 <itsme213@...>
Date: 2005-01-11T04:56:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Immediate values


"Florian Gross" <flgr@ccan.de> wrote in message
news:34g0mpF49vploU1@individual.net...
> 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.
>

That would be great.

[btw: imho, what we are doing is exploiting the space of valid object
references to efficiently encode references to objects that we don't want to
every create explicitly].