Ray Dillinger scripsit:

> It seems to me that we should not be thinking about the encoding
> of characters, regardless of small or large lang, until it is
> time to do I/O.

Byte sequences may have portions that are meant to be interpretable
as characters under a given encoding.  For example, if we want to
construct a DNS request, we need to create a blob some parts of which
(the host name being looked up) is encoded in ASCII and other parts are
binary integers.  This *can* be done as the packet is being sent, but
it doesn't *have* to be done then, and indeed there may be good reasons
to do it in advance.

--
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:                       John Cowan
Never in the field of human computing           cowan@ccil.org
has so much been paid by so many                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to so few! (pace Winston Churchill)