Re: [XCON] On encodings - observations

[Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

> This depends significantly on the distribution of the numbers  
> within the range.  If you have a 16 bit number, only the numbers  
> 0-9 will be shorter than the

Certainly. In most cases of interest here, numbers tend to be small,  
with exceptions.


> binary encoding (not that I'm pushing binary, as you will see. Just  
> trying to get the facts straight.)  This is 0.01% of the time _if_  
> the numbers are evenly distributed.  If they are evenly distributed  
> (which is a big assumption) text will be longer in 98% of the  
> cases.  For 32 bit values, text will be longer in 99.999% of the  
> cases.  (again, distribution is a big issue here.)
>
> > You do pay a price for very long tags, but only if you can't use  
> > gzip- style compression, which essentially does the text-to-code   
> > translation automatically and without penalty.
>
> gzip isn't free.  It costs on small devices and servers handling a  
> lots of connections.  Hence I don't think you can say it is without  
> penalty.

Sure. Let's design systems that work on vacuum-tube computers. This  
is getting silly - the rest of the world does just fine with TLS and  
three-tier web service architectures, and we worry about gzip  
overhead on a server that handles echo cancellation and video  
transcoding. Maybe there is a corollary here to nethead vs. bellhead:  
namely those who have last programmed on a large scale around 1980  
vs. the rest of the world that actually worries about programmer  
productivity and fitting into the computing infrastructure of the  
21st century.

Henning

_______________________________________________
XCON mailing list
XCON at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/xcon