HC 25 years old today

[Richard Gaskin]

Colin Holgate wrote:

 > On Aug 13, 2012, at 8:41 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >
 >> >I suspect that's a lightweight form of bitmap index, but it'll be
 >> interesting to see how it's done.
 >
 > When we were creating the Expanded Books series we had some
 > challenges in fitting the longer books onto a floppy disk. We made
 > the files as .SIT, that helped, but still longer books were a tight
 > squeeze. One trick I did was to set the hint bits to zero, that alone
 > would save enough space that a borderline book would then fit.

Interesting.  I didn't know that was settable - what was the range of 
values one could use?

Bitmap indices are often chosen because of their compact size relative 
to other methods, but I guess nothing's a free ride.  I usually feel 
pretty good if the size of an index is no larger than half the size of 
the corpus, but I'm lazy that way. :)


 > It might mean that the first searches wouldn't be as fast as they
 > could be, but our search method was pretty fast, so it was worth
 > using that trick.

Was it a brute-force free text search, or did you use an index?

If the latter, are you at liberty to discuss your index structure?

So much to learn about indexing, so many options....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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