Question

1. Suppose that a software developer is creating a program to store lists of supermarket products. Each product has a code made up of the digits 0 and 1, for example 010011010000, and an availability, either yes or no. Further suppose that the software developer decides to store the lists in base-10, believing that base-10 will simplify calculations. Briefly explain why this is a bad idea.  

Answer 1

• Below is the detaled explanation of the above mentioned problem.
• So a software developer wants to store a list of supermarket products which are made up of code in binary(i.e, string of 0's and 1's) and a availability(which is a boolean value), but if the developer decides to store the list in base-10 that can be very inefficient.
• As the binary strings can be very large it is very difficult to store those values in base-10 as in most of the languages we do not have a datatype that can support integers having more than 64 bits.
• As these days every computer supports 64 bit architecture so it is the max limit to store integers in most of the languages.
• In some languages like python higher bits integers can also be stored but it is a time consuming process to store very large integers and peforming some calculations on them.
• Consider an example , let the code of a product be a string of length 10^5 (consisting of 0's and 1's) and we now convert this to base-10 , now it is impossible to store these in basic datatypes(int, long long) in most of the languages like C, C++, java as they do not have that much limit but yes we can store them using python but performing calculations on a string of length 10^5 is very very faster than on a base-10 converted integer.
• In C/C++, 10^8 operations are performed in 1sec(2 in java and 5 in python) so it is very faster then converting it in base-10 and then dealing with it.

So there is both storage issue and time complexity also increases , so it is a bad idea to convert binary string to base-10 for long string.

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