Re^3: Jargon relating to Perl strings

[wrog]

Perfect. I shall update.

except you updated the wrong thing. It's the sentence "This is not affected by the string's UTF8 flag," under Basics->"String Value" that's tripping me (and apparently also javafan) up and that needs to either go away or be changed

a grouping of (usually but not always) 8 consecutive bits of physical storage

UTF8=0 storage format.

No, any storage format. In order to talk about storage formats at all you need a word for the raw underlying bytes whatever they are and however they're to be interpreted, and redefining "byte" to mean something else makes this really difficult.

You need a different word, and you're probably right that "octet" isn't a great choice either, so I had another thought: How about one of the following to refer to string elements that are constrained to lie in the 0-255 range?

• "octetchar"
• "octet-character"
• "bytecharacter"
• "byte-character"
• "bytechar"

as opposed to "general character" or "Unicode character" when the full Unicode (or UV) range is possible. This way you're emphasizing that they're still characters in the sense that everybody agrees on (i.e., they're elements of a string and we're abstracting away from how they're represented). If you then say that a single octetchar can actually be multiple bytes in the UTF8=1 storage format, the meaning is clear.

[ikegami]

except you updated the wrong thing.

I had *missed* one of the three spots where I used the problem phrase. Fixed the one I have missed.

In order to talk about storage formats at all you need a word for the raw underlying bytes whatever they are and however they're to be interpreted,

It's not really something that comes up, but "contents of the PV".