4 bit container

[boson]

Hello there gentelmen,
here is my problem. I was wondering. char is 1 byte, short is 2, int is 4 bytes etc. I have a need to calculate with a lots of very large numbers. Outside of the range of all of these containers. I therefore wanna use a lot of small containers to represent ints 0 to 9 I only need a 4bits to represent 16 different values so that would do me. Is there a way to map the memmory in to a 4bits containers or is the byte the smallest you can do on average pc
Cheers

[z05DSL3A]

I have a need to calculate with a lots of very large numbers.

I would look into Arbitrary-precision arithmetic (AKA bignum arithmetic).

Something like: http://gmplib.org/

[hanst99]

char is 1 byte, short is 2, int is 4 bytes etc

Right for char, at least in the C++ definition of a byte. Wrong for the others.

The smallest memory container your machine has is 1 byte.

[moorecm]

If you're still after a container of bits, consider a bitset:
http://cplusplus.com/reference/stl/bitset/

[hanst99]

If his goal was to save memory, that wouldn't really help him though.

[moorecm]

Don't be so sure. It's portable, standard, and up to the implementation to do memory optimizations.

Unbuntu 10.10:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

#include <iostream> #include <bitset> int main() { std::bitset< 8 * 100 > b; std::cout << sizeof( b ) << std::endl; return 0; }

100

[boson]

Thank you guys for you advice