Text in Haskell: A PROPOSAL

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

On Thursday, 2002-08-08, 11:54, CEST, Ketil Z. Malde wrote:
> [...]
> Isn't "byte" or "octet" a better name for what files store and sockets
> transmit?

In school, university and whatever, I always learned that a byte is a
sequence of eight bits. But later I read (I think in the Internet RFC)
something about the possibility of bytes being seven bits long. An octet
is, as the name suggest, defined to be a sequence of eight bits. AFAIK,
there is no guaranty about how many bits "file elements" have. In Ada
95, there is an implementation dependent type Stream_Element (and also
an implementation dependent type Storage_Element which corresponds to
memory cells). But in practice, I think, it is ok to assume a file
element being an octet.

> [...]

Wolfgang