On 10/14/2010 15:49, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > Good point. Perhaps indeed it's best to only deal with bytes and > characters at transport level.
Make that just bytes. Characters data must be encoded into bytes before it is written and decoded before it is read. The low-level OS functions only deal with bytes, not characters. Text encoding is a complicated process - consider different unicode encodings, different non-unicode encodings, byte order markers, and Windows versus Unix line endings. Furthermore, it is often useful to wedge an additional translation layer between the low-level (binary) stream and the high-level text encoding layer, such as an encryption or compression layer. Writing characters directly to streams made sense in the pre-Unicode world where there was a one-to-one correspondence between characters and bytes. In a modern world, text encoding is an important service that deserves its own standalone module. -- Rainer Deyke - rain...@eldwood.com
