Gurusamy Sarathy writes: : On Wed, 09 Feb 2000 10:19:38 PST, Larry Wall wrote: : > use byte; # old perl semantics : : Hey, shouldn't we s/byte/bytes/ like we did for warnings? Yes, I cringe every time I write "use byte". I keep wondering if there's something out there better than "bytes", though. binary binmode octets oldchar eightbit ascii latin1 I think ascii comes the closest in the character set sense, in that it makes no promises about what the 8th bit means, and people loosely use ascii to mean anything latinate anyway. But ascii doesn't have implications of binary or binmode. A familiarity argument could be made with binmode, but it doesn't say much about character sets. I suppose we're stuck with bytes, unless someone can argue me out of it. Larry