On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 6:06 AM, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 7/15/2018 7:37 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > >> One of the classic Unix and Internet tenets is that text is bytes is >> text. > > > Tenets of a faith may be wrong ;-). An informatic paradigm from more than > 45 years ago may be outdated and in need of revision. > > On byte storage and on the Internet, **everything** is (encoded) bytes, so > saying 'text is bytes' says nothing because it is trivially true.
True, but only at *some* abstraction levels. We have to dive down low enough that it's no longer text, but not so low that the bytes become bits, or electrical signals. The ONLY reason that people think "everything is bytes" is that most application programmers never have to go to the lower abstraction layers - in the same way that most application programmers pretend that TCP/IP sockets are pipes that you push stuff onto and it comes out at the other end. It would be just as valid for an accountant to assert that all money amounts are pencil strokes - not numbers, not marks on paper, but movements of a pencil. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list