On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 06:57, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin@btinternet.com> wrote:

On 26/08/2011 10:51 PM, Steve Schafer wrote:

On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:30:02 +0100, you wrote:

You wouldn't want to know how many bits you need to store on disk to
reliably recreate the value?

I can't say that I have cared about that sort of thing in a very long
time. Bits are rather cheap these days. I store data on disk, and the
space it occupies is whatever it is; I don't worry about it.

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?

I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're doing it in your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong.  (The fixed size version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes that need to be thought out beforehand.)