"Everything is just a stream of bytes (of text)?" Neither grep nor diff operate on a stream of bytes in their most common form. They operate on data structures

"Everything is just a stream of bytes (of text)?" Neither grep nor diff operate on a stream of bytes in their most common form. They operate on data structures called "lines" extracted from the stream of bytes according to a pattern hardcoded into the tools themselves. Now that the camel's nose is under the tent…