Byte order

[crowl at rochester]

In article <1298 at mmintl.UUCP> franka at mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
]In article <17312 at rochester.ARPA> crowl at rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
]]CHALLENGE:  Come up with a scheme for representing numbers, and a sorting
]]scheme in which numbers sort naturally.  Your scheme must deal with variable
]]length character strings and variable size numbers.  That is, you cannot
]]require strings to be padded with nulls, or numbers to be padded with zeros.
]
]Basically, you use a unary notation (pure or modified) to indicate how long
]the number is, and the number follows.  Using the scheme above, 257 would
]be ZZZ257.  One and a half would be Z15.  This is essentially floating point
]notation. ...  This has to be modified a bit to deal with negative numbers. ...
]Also, for negative numbers, the digits should be in (9's) complement form. ...
]This can of course be done somewhat better.  A higher radix can be used, and
]the exponent encoding can be further optimized.  But the point is to describe
]the approach, not to work out all the details.

This seems good to me.  If there are no radical alternatives, lets close the
issue.
-- 

Lawrence Crowl             716-275-5766        University of Rochester
                                               Computer Science Department
...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl    Rochester, New York,  14627