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The assumption that 'a byte is eight bits' is less specific than 'a character is one byte is eight bits' but I think captures it pretty well and affects at leas
by Cogito 8y ago
The assumption that 'a byte is eight bits' is less specific than 'a character is one byte is eight bits' but I think captures it pretty well and affects at least all the people who are affected by RTL writing, I would think.
If anything, the one character -> eight bits problem was so large huge amounts of work has been put into developing and using libraries that abstract the representation of text away from byte streams.
- quietbritishjim 8y ago"one byte is eight bits" is extraordinarily different from "one character is eight bits". In fact, by conflating them you are implicitly making the assumption that one character is one byte, which is exactly what your comment is really warning against.
- Cogito 8y agoI agree with you, but was trying to illustrate an example from the class of 'one byte is eight bits' style assumptions. Hopefully I made it clear that 'one character -> one byte -> eight bits' is an assumption that can cause a lot of pain. The simplest usage of non-standard character bytes I can think of from the top of my head is in SMS (as described in that interesting article that was submitted these last few weeks sometime) where the standard used 7-bit character bytes in order to get longer messages, and then struggled to deal with international character encodings. Maybe it's drawing a long bow, but I think this specific example is of the same class of assumptions that jacquesm was describing when they said "a byte is 8 bits", and clearly this is a problem that will not "only cause trouble in rare cases".