this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Programmer Humor

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Did you ever saw a char and thought: "Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient"? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.

Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6

Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.

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[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 35 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (3 children)

After all.. Why not?

Why shouldn’t I ignore the 100+ cultures whose character set couldn’t fit into this encoding?

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 26 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Not 100% relevant but it was in my collection and I thought it was close enough to be funny. :D

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 6 points 12 hours ago

ŚĆŻRŹĘĄMŚ

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 8 points 13 hours ago (2 children)
[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.ml 1 points 17 minutes ago

Yes, which is why we’ve broadly accepted that ASCII isn’t sufficient any more.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 hours ago

They left one bit for the other cultures use.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago