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Postings from February 2000
At 03:33 PM 2/9/00 -0500, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 01:24:59PM -0700, tchrist@chthon.perl.com wrote:
> > >I prefer octets, as that is what all the RFC's seem to call them.
> >
> > Si on a envie de parler non-anglais, alors bien, mais pour
> > les autres, you have to admit that bytes is more what people
> > are used to pensing about.
>
>My sense is that, "octet" is a snobbish jargonesque word for "byte."
>With respect to "ascii," does everyone know that ascii characters are
>always bytes? Certainly "bytes" are always bytes, so "bytes" would seem
>hard to misinterpret.
When the RFCs first started coming out, bytes weren't always 8 bits,
though, hence octet. Not that perl runs on any TOPS-20 machines (does it?),
but byte has historically ranged between 6 and 9 bits depending on the
machine you were on.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
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