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Postings from February 2000
Autarch <autarch@urth.org> writes: > This is the most hostile mailing list I've ever been on. I am extremely > hesitant to write this because I suspect that someone is going to have a > fit at me. I swear that if I didn't know better I would suspect that > this list was largely populated by 13-17 year old boys. In fact, it > strongly reminds me of my BBS'ing days back in high school. To be fair, they generally only do this with people they know. By and large the list is reasonably nice to new posters unless they're extremely confrontational. Anyway, to throw in another data point here (if not an opinion, as I'm not sure I care either way), "octet" is the term used in IETF standards precisely due to the potential ambiguity of "byte." Note that ISO C does not require that byte be eight bits, only that it be the same size as char and be *at least* eight bits. If someone's reading the (soon to be current) mail or news standards and writing Perl code based on that, the label "octet" will be familiar and possibly more intuitive than "byte." -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>