Subject: Re: Q: How to write binary data to a file? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 05 Sep 2002 09:17:29 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3240206249349704@naggum.no> * Tim Bradshaw <tfb@cley.com> | 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.