Hi together,

Working on xml serialization (and boxed [more about that in my next summary 
mail]) I noticed that we are missing support for byte in mspec:

By (logical) definition a byte is a container of a bits without a immediate 
semantical meaning. This could be for example a image, binary data of a 
compiled program etc.
Opposed to a strongly typed definition of uint8 where the meaning would be „a 
unsigned integer with 8-bit storage“ which could be a sensory data.
When using these in an array I would render the first one (byte) as a hex 
string (or base64/cdata) “<data>AFFE</data>"  in xml whereas the latter one 
(uint 8) I would render as „<data><value>175</value><value>254</value></data>. 
Same would apply to my boxes where I would render the first one as a pretty 
hex-dump (with line numbers and string representation) and the latter as pretty 
value boxes with contained integers.

For that we would add a write(byte[]) read(byte[]) to the Writer/Reader and 
call them from the template whenever we are sure that the data we write is of 
the definition „byte“. Same could be done to single values and their rendering 
of course.

For the api-user and the data itself on the wire nothing would change, it would 
just make testing and debugging a whole lot easier.

What do you think?

Sebastian

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