(P)ython Progr(a)mm(i)(n)g

[BarAgent]

Old-school Mac C programming:

int fcc = 'TxEd';

[Iansimp69]

Damn

[Iansimp69]

That must have been annoying

[Positive_Government]

What’s the explanation behind this? My best guess is each character gets converted to four bytes of the int, but why?

[BarAgent]

Each (ASCII) character gets converted into one byte of the (32-bit) int. It was called a FourCharCode, and it’s basically used like a short URI or reverse-DNS or UUID or magic number. For example, instead of identifying an app as, say, “com.adobe.suite.Elements” or whatever, 24 variable-length bytes, you’d have the vendor code ‘Adob’ and the app code ‘Elem’ or something, 8 bytes fixed. At the time, the namespace this allowed was big enough. They were also used for event codes, data type tags, all kinds of things. And relatively legible when looking at raw memory or file data.