Talk:Twenty-three

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Should we note that there is a movie named : Number 23.. in this movie, the number 23 is the devil. http://www.number23movie.com/ --Thomadaneau 20:17, 19 February 2007 (CST)

  • no, since it post-dates pretty much everything right now it can't be referenced anywhere. link's broken, btw. --Evilkolbot 00:23, 20 February 2007 (CST)

Buff Cap

I am going to actually agree with Carolingian Tortoise that the buff cap at 223-1 is a special thing dealing with the number 23. PHP standard integers are 4 bytes in length, just like most other modern programming languages (other standards are 1, 2, and 8 bytes, never 3 though). Even if it were 3-bytes in length, the integer would be 24 bits wide, making the cap 224-1, since it'd also be unsigned. --MindlessGames 21:02, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

What matters more is the way it's structured in the MySQL records that interface with PHP, not what PHP can handle. With as many people who play this game, one byte per can be a significant savings on disk, in transit between the SQL and Web servers, and in active memory. - Msanychta 21:54, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
In addition, most of the time, programmers use signed integers simply because it's simpler and easier to specify them that way, and because of their commonality in programming, some CPU circuitry is specifically optimized for signed arithmetic. (Though I doubt Jick was anal enough to think that deeply, else he'd probably use a compiled language like C for more efficiency.) - Msanychta 21:56, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
If they were really concerned about the extra bytes, they'd use a 2-byte integer, because 65535 turns of an effect is more than you really ever need, and it'd be word-aligned, so you could pack two effects in one memory word. With 3-bytes, that extra byte does absolutely nothing, since your interpreter or compiler is going to assign 4 bytes in memory to it anyway. Alternatively, I suppose it'd be just as easy to ask Jick about it. --MindlessGames 22:17, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

PHP does not support unsigned integers, according to http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php . It strikes me as somewhat of a stretch that Jick happened to notice that a three-byte integer is 2^23 in PHP, and then used that as a special number, but only in the specific instance of maximum buff length (which hardly anyone ever reaches or notices). And if he did, well, *shrug* he has too much free time. :P --Crawly2 00:36, 10 August 2009 (UTC)