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vbakke edited this page Dec 27, 2017 · 5 revisions

trytes

This prject is currently discussing how to convert between trytes and bytes in a good way, that may be implemented in most programming languages.

What's a tryte?

Some treat 3 trits as a tryte.
Some treat 5 trits as a tryte.
Some treat 6 trits as a tryte.
(Just as there were 7-bits and 8-bits bytes at the beginning of time.)

Here we'll use the tryte3, tryte5 and tryte6 to indicate which tryte we are talking about. If the word tryte is used, it should mean trytes or trinary in general.

How do we fit the square peg in the round hole?

We need to both put square pegs in round holes, as well as the round pegs in the square holes.

There's going to be some wasted space, no matter how we solve this.

  • tryte3 can hold values 0-26
  • tryte5 can hold values 0-242
  • byte8 can hold values 0-255
  • tryte6 can hold values 0-728

One cannot convert down this chain, without restricting the input.

Adding two-bytes Unicode does not help. It just creates a bigger square box outside the tryte6, an an even bigger tryte12 around the byte16 box again. When reverting back to a "smaller size", same problem appears.

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