Subject: Re: Waving the lambda flag again (was: Constants and DEFCONSTANT) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/04/08 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3132593479131324@naggum.no> * mikemac@mikemac.com (Mike McDonald) | OK, this is where you lost me. 400 years takes 9 bits but you're going | to stick it in an 8 bit memory location? How are you doing that again? Mike, do me a favor, now. carefully, on your own, not posting anything until you're done, go away from the computer, pick up a refence book on Common Lisp, preferably the actual standard, but either CLtL or CLtL2 will do just fine, and _read_ about bytes operations in Common Lisp. here's a summary of the situation from historic perspective: the 8-bit byte at an 8-bit boundary is a special case of the more general byte concept. the 1990's hardware "byte" is 8 bits with the same machine address. the _software_ "byte" is any contiguous number of bits in an _integer_. some processors can extract a byte out of a machine integer in one operation, while others need two: a shift and a mask. because Common Lisp is not a hardware-oriented language, it does not deal with the machine concepts, but the historically correct _concept_. and _no_ bullshit about how this will confuse other ignorants, OK? #:Erik