Re: bit strings - anyone working on them?

At 09:15 AM 23/04/2003 +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
>Do you right pad that 101? No way!!! You left pad it!

See my earlier post in this thread questioning which was the low order bit.
The current implementation is schizophrenic about this: it seems to treat
the left-hand bits as low order sometimes, and the right-hand bits as low
order when converting integer. It can't make up it's mind if it is a string
or a number.

If we treat left as low order, then:

1 | 10 => 10

Cast(8 as varbit(10)) => 0001000000
Cast(8 as varbit(32)) => 00010000000000000000000000000000
etc

Which, on the whole, makes more sense. It's just hard to get around the
notion of '10' being decimal 1, not 2.

Also, I think substring is the only way to extract bits, and I would expect:

Substring(Cast(8 as bit(X)), 4,1)

should produce 1, which it does not. But if we adopt the left-bits-are-low
philosophy, it works.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind if we adopt left-bits-are-high, then we
just need to change the way substring & padding works. No idea which is better.

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