Binary I/O

• Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 19:31:24 PST
• From:
  hpa@trantor.storm.net (H. Peter Anvin)
• Content-Type: text
• Newsgroups: local.moo
• Organization: Where Stormnet meets the Internet

On the subject of binary I/O, I must say I have personally been
partial to the "byte vector" syntax used in LPMOO (I think.)

A probably bastardized version goes as follows:

expr ::= bytevect | ...whatever expr currently is...

bytevect ::= '[' ']' | '[' bytes ']'

bytes ::= expr | expr ',' bytes

The expressions can be integers or strings; integers get translated to
the appropriate ASCII code and strings are inlined as-is.  (It could
be made legal to include byte vectors, lists, floats, objects or errors; the
former two would simply recurse and the latter three would have effectively
toint() applied on them.)

Another thing that would probably be a lot easier to implement but
would be very helpful to non-U.S. sites would be to have the printable
character set be runtime configurable (probably a property on
$server_options?)  European sites probably want the whole ISO 8859
character set available, for example.  It's okay to always disallow control
characters < 0x20, if necessary, however.

	-hpa
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