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Postings from February 2000
At 02:55 PM 2/9/00 -0500, Mark Mielke wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 11:15:34AM -0800, "Larry Wall" wrote:
> > 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.
> >...
> > octets
> >...
>
>I prefer octets, as that is what all the RFC's seem to call them. This
>would be similar to "use integer;" for numbers, "use octet;" for strings
>would limit it to 8 bit characters. (Note that it isn't "use integers;",
>it is "use integer;")
>
>I'd stay away from calling them ascii or latin1, as they are merely
>code dictionaries mapping codes to symbols. Just because ascii only
>defines up to 128 codes, doesn't mean that it cannot be represented in
>a any 7+ bit integer. Proof? UTF-8 encompasses ascii. Ascii is a
>subset of UTF-8.
>
>Use of ascii, latin1, etc. should be reserved for character
>conversions. Just because ascii happens to be a subset of latin1, and
>a subset of UTF-8 is mostly just a coincidence. The functionality
>provided by the current "use byte;" is that any such assumptions about
>encodings are discarded, and all strings are viewed plainly as a
>string of octets with complete disregard to encoding.
hmmm... If its all about character sets / encodings...
use charset 'ascii';
use charset 'utf8';
use charset 'unicode';
no charset; # Or...
use charset 'none'; # Implies 8 bits?
Or, maybe, s/charset/encoding/
--Gregor
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Gregor N. Purdy gregor@focusresearch.com |
| |
| Swiss army chainsaw operator. y2k: perl -pe 'tr/yY/kK/' |
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