Language design

[Mark Janssen]

>> On Tue, 10 Sep 2013, Ben Finney wrote:
>> >  The sooner we replace the erroneous
>> >  “text is ASCII” in the common wisdom with “text is Unicode”, the
>> >  better.
>>
>> I'd actually argue that it's better to replace the common wisdom with
>> "text is binary data, and we should normally look at that text through
>> Unicode eyes". A little less catchy, but more accurate ;)
>
> No, that's inaccurate. A sequence of bytes is binary data. Unicode is
> not binary data.

Well now, this is an area that is not actually well-defined.  I would
say 16-bit Unicode is binary data if you're encoding in base 65,536,
just as 8-bit ascii is binary data if you're encoding in base-256.
Which is to say:  there is no intervening data to suggest a TYPE.
-- 
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington