[r6rs-discuss] use of "bytes"

From: William D Clinger <will>
Date: Mon Nov 20 14:29:30 2006

I am posting this as an individual member of the Scheme
community. I am not speaking for the R6RS editors.

There are at least two problems with the use of "bytes"
in the draft R6RS. Both are evident in the draft's use
of "bytes object" and "bytes objects", while other data
types are referred to by the name of the data type in
both singular and plural, e.g. "pair" and "pairs".

Problem 1: The draft R6RS defines "byte" as a technical
term for an integer in the range [-128,+127], and uses
"bytes" as the plural of "byte".

Problem 2: The word "bytes" is plural, so it can't be
used to refer by itself to refer to a single object,
and there is no distinguishable plural (byteses?) that
could be used to refer to multiple objects.

Jeff Read wrote:
> All the more reason why "binary" is a much better name for those
> things.

Cute, but the plural "binaries" would be confusing.

I prefer u8vector, or bytevector, or byte-vector, or
octet-vector, or octet-sequence, or octetta [1], or
blocktet [2], or just about any noun whose singular
and plural forms are different and don't already mean
something else in the context of the report. I've
come around to think that even "bob" would be better
than "bytes".

Will

[1] A Google search for octetta brought up exactly
one result.
[2] Made-up words are better than using a familiar
word with our new made-up meaning.
Received on Mon Nov 20 2006 - 14:29:23 UTC