Bytes and Bits Question

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Bytes and Bits Question

Ked(Posted 2008) [#1]
If you wanted a passcode 256 bits long would you have a passcode with 32 characters long?

Thanks.


REDi(Posted 2008) [#2]
Yes, 8*32=256


SebHoll(Posted 2008) [#3]
Depends whether its a unicode or ascii string... BlitMax strings are Unicode, which means they use 2 bytes (16 bits) to store every character, as oppose to the older ASCII strings which only require 1 (8 bits).

As such, if you are using a BlitzMax string to represent a 256-bit passcode, you could argue, that you should use:

256/16 = 16 Unicode Characters

However, you could argue that for pass-codes, you will only be using the ASCII character set anyway, and so it would be more sensible to use 32 ASCII characters as it would be more secure with a smaller range of character values.