From: Bob Hutchison <hutch@...>
Date: 2001-11-12T22:08:11+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24925] Re: XML libraries (Re:  Re: ruby and	webservices)

On 01/11/12 5:18 AM, "Sean Russell" <ser@efn.org> wrote:

> Martin v. Loewis wrote:
>> That is also the approach Python took; you also need a powerful
>> encoding library to go with the character string type, to convert
>> between byte strings and character strings.
> 
> By byte strings, do you mean ASCII strings?

There is a problem caused by history that can be partially illustrated by
IO. IO moves buffers of bytes around, not buffers of characters. So, for
example, if you get a buffer back from file IO or a socket (or almost
anything else) you are getting bytes. Some of these bytes may be doubles,
some integers, some characters. You need to provide library routines to grab
characters/strings from these byte buffers (and, of course, put them into
byte streams). A lot of code is going to break -- there is *so* much code
out there that explictly/implicitly equates a character with a byte then
builds on this assumption. This is probably best handled through the
libraries provided by the programming language, though I don't this this can
solve everything. Even though Java provides the tools, there is still a lot
of code being written right now that doesn't get this right. I don't know
the situation with Python.

What we have not begun to talk about is localisation (note the spelling,
this is spelled correctly where I come from :-)

> 
> --- SER