Jeff Clites <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 28, 2004, at 4:57 AM, Bryan C. Warnock wrote:
>> Does (that which the masses normally refer to as) binary data >> fall inside or outside the scope of a string? > Some languages make this very clear by providing a separate data type > to hold a "blob of bytes". Back to Parrot, which isn't covered by the manifesto. But anyway we already need[1] "enum_stringrep_blob" or "_bytes". I can't imagine that we use a different data type, this would totally mess with Perl compatibility. We must ensure that such a string is never upscaled to another string representation. We can do all byte-wise operations on such a string, but e.g. appending an utfX string or such should be an error. The main problem currently seems to be IO, where the best thing would be to move the current hacks into a separate layer above the buffered layer. An additiional parameter for open (or layer manipulation features) can select byte-wise IO. [1] - transparent IO e.g. $ parrot md5sum.imc a.out - freeze/thaw - writing packfiles from PASM > JEff leo
