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Postings from February 2000
On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Mark Mielke wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 01:24:59PM -0700, "Tom Christiansen" wrote:
> > 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.
> If they can't understand it, perhaps they shouldn't be using it in
> the first place?
No, that doesn't follow. Let me give a specific counterexample. I
currently use perl to manipulate raw data from images from my experiments.
The data is raw binary. No character sets. No encoding. Just raw output
from the A-D converters.
My very limited understanding of utf is that unless I specifically
instruct perl5.6 otherwise, perl5.6 may possibly interpret some of my data
as meaningful utf thingies and do something I don't expect with it. In
this case, I want a way to turn off utf interpretation without having to
understand in any detail whatsoever what it is, other than that it could
wreck my data.
My use is clearly a minority use, and I don't (really) mind (too much)
having to go in and change all my programs to 'use byte;' (well I'll also
probably install a dummy byte.pm in @INC in my older installations).
As far as jargon goes, "byte" suits me just fine.
Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu