New answers tagged binary
1
The technique idea is perfectly described in Yuval Filmus answer. Even if slightly different, it is called Truncated binary encoding in Wikipedia. I couldn't find an original source for that, apart from a mention in a patent, in this book, or in this Google API
1
Suppose $k = 2^{n-1} + t$, where $0 \leq t < 2^{n-1}$. Use the following to encode $z \in \{0,\ldots,k-1\}$:
If $z < 2^{n-1}-t$ then encode $z$ as its own $(n-1)$-bit encoding.
Otherwise, write $z = 2^{n-1}-t + 2\delta+\epsilon$, where $\delta \in \{0,\ldots,t-1\}$ and $\epsilon \in \{0,1\}$. Encode $z$ at the $(n-1)$-bit encoding of $2^{n-1}-t+\delta$...
3
The question of how foreign languages justifies expanding the encoding in actual usage is well explained by earlier answers. The question of why foreign languages would affect the American Standard Code for Information Interchange is subtly different.
As you all know the ASCII chart needed to be extended from 127 encoding to 256
No. The original American ...
5
There are a few other good reasons to expand from 7-bit ASCII, but since you ask specifically about foreign languages, I want to tell you about that angle.
English has words with diacritical marks, usually loan words like naïve or café. They are rare, and usually you'll get into no trouble for omitting the diacritics. Occasionally one might stumble into a ...
0
Your professor is unclear here. If you know the number is eight, you don’t need to store it - zero bits. The question should be “how many bits do I need to store one of k different values”. For example , to be able to store a value from 0 to 8, 3 bits are not enough, you need four bits.
But if you store large amounts of numbers of different sizes, and you ...
10
ASCII has 128 characters. Many countries had similar encodings for 128 characters. That is all history. Nobody uses ASCII anymore. There was a phase with lots of different encodings for more than 128 characters, some with 256 (Mac Roman and Windows 1152 were quite popular) and some like the Chinese GB with thousands of characters.
Nowadays people mostly ...
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