In article <hbaker-1504971737030001@10.0.2.1>, hbaker@netcom.com says...
>
>In article <5j0gq5$jbi@mimsy.cs.umd.edu>, clin@cs.umd.edu (Charles Lin) wrote:
>
>> If one had to choose a single type for everything, a string is a
>> pretty good choice. Why not a number? How would you represent a
>> string with a number?
>
>Goedel showed how to represent everything with bignums.
same thing, really. Gödel used base 1000, strings use base 256. (tcl strings,
anyway, where NUL can't be used. the "obivous" mapping won't distinguish the
null string from NUL from NUL-NUL etc.)
IIRC, it was in fact one of JO's points, that in a computer *everything* is a
number. i'm just as glad he chose to use strings, since i don't think i'd like
programming in 38154 much:
34758273445786346634726782237283742374857385683724
is my new newsreader, but it's got a bug. can you find it? :)
|