Subject: Re: Q: How to write binary data to a file?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 05 Sep 2002 09:17:29 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3240206249349704@naggum.no>

* Tim Bradshaw <tfb@cley.com>
| This is really cool.  Not only have they decided to use a weird term,
| *they've got it wrong* because - as any Lisp person should know,
| especially one who has read this thread - a byte *isn't* an octet, or
| not in all uses of the term!  So some time in some French article
| (perhaps on Common Lisp), someone is going to correct `byte' to
| `octet' and completely destroy the meaning of what was written

  A Dictionary of Computing from Oxford University Press actually has this
  informative entry:

octet   Eight contiguous bits; an eight bit byte. The term is used instead of
byte to prevent confusion in cases where the term has preexisting hardware
associations, as in machines with 7-bit bytes, 9-bit bytes, 12-bit bytes.

  But their "byte" idea is "a fixed number of bits that can be treated as a
  unit by the computer hardware", which is just plain wrong.

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.