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Re: should "use byte" be "use bytes"?

From:
Larry Wall
Date:
February 9, 2000 11:20
Subject:
Re: should "use byte" be "use bytes"?
Message ID:
200002091915.LAA21127@kiev.wall.org
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



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