On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 04:42:13AM +0000, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
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> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:19:07PM +0200, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 06:32:11PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> If you are at that, it's worth noting that the currency tag consists
> of three capital ASCII letters. That would be fifteen bits, take or
> give.
I feel silly for even mentioning this, but there are less than 256
countries in the UN, and as far as I know, each has at most one
currency, so you could use 8 bits instead of 15.
> That leaves forty-eightish bits for the number or about 10^14.
By the above calculation, 56 bits or about 7.2 * 10^16.
> THis is only half-serious, since there are other problems with
> currencies (their value is dependent on time, all that Pandora's
> box).
It's not just dependent on time. Exchange rates vary in such a way
that the relationships are not always transitive :P
Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Skype: davidfetter
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