How much memory may a HPPL program use on a G2?

[jte]

Another approach to handle blocks of characters when checking for matches (against a pattern of the sort mentioned above — single-character wildcards) that follows more traditional computer-y approaches would be to use 5 bits per character (assuming <= 32 different characters) for the encoding (and thus pack up to 12 characters into a 64-bit integer) and then use a mask to select which characters must match specific characters.

E.g., using

Code:

BITAND(#00001 00010 00011b,#11111 00000 11111b) = #00001 00000 00100b

to check “abc” against pattern “a?d”, where “a” is encoded as 00001, “b” as 00010, … (I’ve used extra spaces to help demarcate the 5-bit blocks.)