On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 11:57:57 +0100, you wrote:
I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits class allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want some way to know how many bits you need to keep?
For fixed-size types (e.g., Int), I might use a simple byte-for-byte serialization. But these days, I tend to avoid binary serializations, and use string conversions for all types, taking advantage of whatever built-in conversions the language offers. There's obviously more overhead, but the advantages usually outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, I can come back a couple of years later and still figure out what the data are supposed to be.
Likewise, you say the standard PRNG can be used to generate random Integers, but what if you're trying to implement a new PRNG?
I'm not aware of of any PRNGs that use variable-length types (and I would think that such a PRNG wouldn't be very efficient), so I'm still not sure that I understand the question. -Steve Schafer