Glamour and why it's poorly designed

[Mhaeric]

It's more than possible to store a list of simple 0 and 1 bits in a form much smaller than the number of items in that list. A simple 8-bit binary number can store a list of up to 256 0s and 1s for example.

[Callinon]

It's more than possible to store a list of simple 0 and 1 bits in a form much smaller than the number of items in that list. A simple 8-bit binary number can store a list of up to 256 0s and 1s for example.

Well no... an 8-bit number can store exactly 8 zeroes and ones. Doing it with bitvectors is probably still a better use of memory, but now we're getting into interpolation, encoding, and maintenance of a complex array of thousands of items.

[Mhaeric]

Well no... an 8-bit number can store exactly 8 zeroes and ones.

I didn't say how many 0s and 1s an 8-bit number can hold. I said how large a list of 1s and 0s (i.e. booleans) that an 8-bit binary number could store. You seem to understand just fine that I was referring to a bit array given your bitvector comment, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned this.

[Callinon]

I didn't say how many 0s and 1s an 8-bit number can hold. I said how large a list of 1s and 0s (i.e. booleans) that an 8-bit binary number could store. You seem to understand just fine that I was referring to a bit array given your bitvector comment, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned this.

Maybe I'm not understanding you. An 8-bit number looks like this:
00000000 (0)
all the way up to
11111111 (255)

That's 8 bits you have to work with in there, therefore 8 points of data that can be either on or off. Which bits toggled on changes the decimal value of the number, but it's still just 8 points of data:
10011001 (153)

In this way we can represent 8 boolean values in a single space instead of 8 different spaces.

I think we're talking about the same thing with different words.