From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2005-05-02T03:29:27+09:00
Subject: Re: collections with values of fixed classes/lengths

Eric Mahurin <eric_mahurin@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Here would be a few examples of what I'm talking about and how
> much space per element it would take:
> 
> - array of Floats (64 bits per element)
> - array of N-bit integers (N bits per element)
> - hash of 2-character strings (2*8 bits per key and Object per
> value)
> - array of array of 8 Floats (8*64 bits per line)
> 
> For dealing with large data structures, this could be
> invaluable for memory usage.

I suspect the easiest way is to make a C extension (possibly copying
code from Ruby's array.c and  hash.c) that took in a datatype as an
argument to its constructor and malloced etc. based on that.

martin