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Re: should "use byte" be "use bytes"?

From:
Mark Mielke
Date:
February 9, 2000 13:45
Subject:
Re: should "use byte" be "use bytes"?
Message ID:
20000209164810.C3801@pcard12x.ca.nortel.com
On Wed, Feb 09, 2000 at 04:03:51PM -0500, "Andy Dougherty" wrote:
> 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.

Here we have a case of not understanding, and you shouldn't use it.

This is all supposed to Work The Right Way. Ilya had to fight many
battles to get people to understand this, which is what Larry was
referring too.

> 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).

You won't have to, unless you do really really silly things that you
prob'ly shouldn't do in the first place and they deserve to break.

:-)

mark

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