Bit type?

[Dan]

Stewart Gordon Wrote:
> Meanwhile, Phobos has std.bitarray.  I also have a bit array implementation 
> capable of arbitrary slicing:
> http://pr.stewartsplace.org.uk/d/sutil/

Yeah, more or less.

> 4-bit type?  I guess some of the bit array code could be modified to give 
> nibble arrays, if that's what you mean....
> 
> Stewart.

Yeah okay.  A nibble[] then.  Or I might opt to go a little smaller.

See, while almost no complex operations are done on DNA, pattern-matches are done often, and trying to do that on the human genome is to pattern-match against 3 billion base-pairs (6GB if you're tight-ship, 24GB if you use char)

My guess is that the process would be an exercise in DMA and cache prefetch timing.

So back on subject, how does one implement a nibble[] without a nibble type?  Would I be using a struct containing byte[] and overloading opIndex and such to reflect half the "nibble" index into the "byte" index?

: p