[R6RS] I/O design

William D Clinger will at ccs.neu.edu
Wed Dec 6 16:25:34 EST 2006


I'm sorry, but I reversed the sense of a calculation I
reported in my previous message.  The two paragraphs
that are affected should have read:

    Please note that "every byte sequence has an interpretation
    as text and vice versa" is highly misleading.  In sequences
    of random bytes, about 44.5% of the bytes will not represent
    the beginning of a legal UTF-8 character, which means that
    Mike's proposal would replace almost half of the bytes by an
    error character.  To Mike, that doesn't matter much, and
    "interleaving textual and binary I/O is no problem at all."

    To someone who actually wishes to process binary data,
    corrupting almost half of the bytes is likely to matter.

The rest of my message was not affected by this blunder.

Will



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