Hi from silly standards land,
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Brian Aker<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> LENGTH we need to keep. That would blow compatibility pretty badly.
<length expression> ::=
<char length expression>
| <octet length expression>
<char length expression> ::=
{ CHAR_LENGTH | CHARACTER_LENGTH } <left paren> <string value expression>
[ USING <char length units> ] <right paren>
<octet length expression> ::=
OCTET_LENGTH <left paren> <string value expression> <right paren>
just FYI, but going by the standard, LENGTH is actually the odd duck.
As for use of the term byte vs octet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)
"Early in its history, in the age of computer science preceding
tabletop and desktop microcomputers (the earliest of which almost all
used 8-bit data words,) the word byte was not standardized to 8 bits
and could indicate a unit of different sizes (all relatively small) in
different contexts and for different machines."
so that's why. Octet is explicitly referring to a group of 8 bits.
kind regards,
Roland
>
> Cheers,
> -Brian
>
> On Jul 6, 2009, at 4:11 AM, Stewart Smith wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 09:09:08AM -0000, Devananda vdv wrote:
>>>
>>> Arjen's comment on facebook got me thinking about how much I don't like
>>> LENGTH() because it's ambiguous. I've griped on this issue in other
>>> languages too, particularly PHP. Without checking the documentation, to
>>> the
>>> casual western user, it seems like a character count because
>>> LENGTH('abc')
>>> == CHAR_LENGTH('abc').
>>>
>>> I'm also not a fan of OCTET_LENGTH... "byte" is a much more commonly used
>>> term ;)
>>>
>>> What do you think about removing LENGTH() and renaming OCTET_LENGTH to
>>> BYTE_LENGTH?
>>
>>
>> Pretty simple to have BYTE_LENGTH be an alias.... although removing
>> LENGTH does change SQL compatibility. So I wonder what others think...
>>
>> --
>> Stewart Smith
>>
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>
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--
Roland Bouman
http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/
Author of "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data
Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL",
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470484322.html
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