• (nodebb) in reply to groz
    As a side note, if Jay's boss was consistent in his System Hungarian variable naming, why the bloody hell is he adding a string value (zip_code) to a currency value (account_balance)?

    In the US, the Zip Code was originally a 5 digit number indicating which postal station to send the mail to. That can be "efficiently" stored in a 64-bit integer; an unsigned 32-bit integer only goes up to 65535, so unless you are restricting all addresses to exclude the western states, it would not do. 64-bit integer uses 8 bytes. A 5-character string stores in 6 bytes (5 characters, plus either a length byte or a terminating null character, depending on the language). It could be up to 19 bytes (8 byte pointer, 1-byte length, 5*2-byte Unicode characters) or more, again depending on the language. So clearly, storing a zip code in a Long is the correct way to do this. At least until you try to send mail to Canada or Britain or any other country that include letters in their postal codes.

    For over a decade, the USPS has been using Zip+4 Code, which not only tells them which postal station to send the mail to, but also where in the area serviced by the postal station to deliver the mail. e.g. 00112-4130. It really is time to convert this to a string. It has been for a while.

  • b.a. freeman (unregistered) in reply to cellocgw

    do U also try to reassign π in those scripts? i and j are set to sqrt( -1) for a good reason in them.

  • o11c (unregistered)

    FYI, if you ever need to deal with this kind of thing ... pray that your language supports anonymous unions.

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