From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!news.teledanmark.no!uninett.no!uio.no!nntp.uio.no!ifi.uio.no!not-for-mail From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Q: How to write binary data to a file? Date: 05 Sep 2002 09:17:29 +0000 Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 23 Message-ID: <3240206249349704@naggum.no> References: <4n0qy61d0.fsf@beta.franz.com> <4ofbdwzo4.fsf@beta.franz.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: maud.ifi.uio.no 1031217449 1176 129.240.64.16 (5 Sep 2002 09:17:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@ifi.uio.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 5 Sep 2002 09:17:29 GMT Mail-Copies-To: never User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:39683 * Tim Bradshaw | 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.