I'm designing a language, and trying to decide whether true should be 0x01 or 0xFF. Obviously, all non-zero values will be converted to true, but I'm trying to decide on the exact internal represen...

I'm just curious if there's a reason why in order to represent -1 in binary, two's complement is used: flipping the bits and adding 1? -1 is represented by 11111111 (two's complement) rather than ...

On an x86_64 architecture, a pointer is 8 bytes. It makes sense to me that sizeof(x) should return 8. I understand that a char is a single byte, and 5 bytes is the size of array z. What is the intu...

R seems to support an efficient NA value in floating point arrays. How does it represent it internally? My (perhaps flawed) understanding is that modern CPUs can carry out floating point calculati...

There are various articles out there on the interwebs that try to empirically estimate the overhead of a java.lang.Object in particular JVM implementations. For example, I've seen the size overhead...

Recently I came across a bug/feature in several languages. I have a very basic knowledge about how it's caused (and I'd like some detailed explanation), but when I think of all the bugs I must have...

What is the underlying datastructure of datetime values stored in SQL Server (2000 and 2005 if different)? Ie down to the byte representation? Presumably the default representation you get when yo...