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.eduThread Previous | Thread Next