Ilya Zakharevich writes: : Larry Wall writes: : > I prefer bytes over octets because it's one <mumble> shorter. : : use 8bit; : : Make this parse. Offhand, I can't think of any reason not to, other than that people will start clamoring for package 8bit; and $8bit::foo to parse too. From there they'll want $8bit to parse, and then s/(\d+)foo/$1bar/ may break. Larry