Internal representations of data types

[dmc@piccolo.ecn.purdue.edu (David M Chelberg)]

Is there somewhere which documents the storage various data types
require?  In an old version of AKCL arrays of type '(mod 256) used to
take up just one byte of storage.  Now in version 1.473 they appear to
take up 4 bytes and appear to be internally typed as fixnums.  Is
there some way to get back to the old representation? Or is there an
alternate type definition I could use when creating the array to
insure only one byte of storage is used.  This becomes extremely
important when passing arrays to C language routines.  I have found
that characters take only one byte, but then I am constantly using
code-char and char-code to convert to numbers, although C doesn't seem
to care.  I hope that there is some way to coerce AKCL into using only
one byte to represent numbers.  My domain is image understanding and
processing.  When you have many large images representing them
efficiently is important.

 -- Prof. David Chelberg (dmc@piccolo.ecn.purdue.edu)
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