[Not speaking for the editors, as usual.]
Chris Hanson <cph_at_csail.mit.edu> writes:
> This is kind of a minor issue, but I wonder how people feel about using
> the word "octet" rather than "byte" for the report? "Octet" is very
> precise, and was adopted by the IETF because a "byte" isn't necessarily
> 8 bits. (See definition from Wikipedia below.)
The report actually uses the term "octet" in the meaning you refer to,
for the reasons you cite. It also uses a specific definition of the
word "byte", also defined in the report, which is different from that
of octet.
Note that "bytes objects" are agnostic as to what kind of values they
contain. "Octet" seemed foreign enough to enough people to make the
editors choose "byte." Moreover, the looseness in the notion of
"bytes" is actually more appropriate for the agnostic nature of bytes objects.
You might find the discussion archived for SRFI 66 (which ultimately
led to the design of SRFI 74 [where bytes objects were called "blobs"]
which in turn is the basis for the bytes library in the draft)
interesting, which also revolved mostly around the naming issue:
http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-66/
--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, V?lkerverst?ndigung und ?berhaupt blabla
Received on Mon Nov 20 2006 - 13:38:01 UTC