[scheme-reports-wg1] Re: Blobs vs. byte vectors John Cowan 23 May 2011 06:37 UTC

Andy Wingo scripsit:

> It is a leaky abstraction, I think.  For any unit which is not one
> byte in length, you always have to be concerned about the size of the
> total array.  There's no way to treat (make-blob 5) as an array of u32
> values.

Well, technically you could see it as two overlapping u32s, one in
bytes 0-3 and the other in bytes 1-4, or whatever.  The reason I
didn't propose SRFI-4-compatible stuff in the BlobAPI is to allow
misalignments.  Although I did list the possibility of requiring
alignment under Issues.

> How would a blob not be interpretable an array of bytes?

Well, it always would be, yes: bytes are the least common denominator.
But so would bits be.

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