Tomasz Zielonka
Did you consider using an encoding which uses variable number of bytes? If yes, I would be interested to know your reason for not choosing such an encoding. Efficiency?
My Binary implementation (from 1998) used a type-specific number of bits to encode the constructor - exactly as many as needed. (If you were writing custom instances, you could even use a variable number of bits for the constructor, e.g. using Huffman encoding to make the more common constructors have the shortest representation.) The latter certainly imposes an extra time overhead on decoding, because you cannot just take a fixed-size chunk of bits and have the value. But I would have thought that in the regular case, using a type-specific (but not constructor-specific) size for representing the constructor would be very easy and have no time overhead at all. Regards, Malcolm