General Structure
The encoding assumes an octet (an eight-bit byte) where the most significant bit (MSB), also commonly known as the sign bit, is reserved to indicate whether another VLQ octet follows.
| 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | 26 | 25 | 24 | 23 | 22 | 21 | 20 |
| A | Bn | ||||||
If A is 0, then this is the last VLQ octet of the integer. If A is 1, then another VLQ octet follows.
B is a 7-bit number and n is the position of the VLQ octet where B0 is the least significant. The VLQ octets are arranged most significant first in a stream.
Read more about this topic: Variable-length Quantity
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or structure:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)