Re: [q-lang-users] Two proposed improvements to Q

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

Albert Graef scripsit:

> John, I hope that this is what you had in mind. It still lacks the "...
> and strings using a specified character code" part, though. Considering
> that a byte string might actually contain character data in an arbitrary
> encoding, it's not clear to me how that should be done, could you
> elaborate please?

What you've got looks good.  For strings, I had something in mind like

        get_string Bytes EncodingName StartIndex EndIndex

to decode a portion of a byte string into a string, and

        put_string Bytes EncodingName Index String

to encode a string into a portion of a byte string.  These allow you to
process character data wherever it might exist in a binary sequence.
However, the latter produces an unpredictable number of bytes, and might
need to be supplemented with a factory

	byte_string EncodingName String


-- 
You escaped them by the will-death              John Cowan
and the Way of the Black Wheel.                 co...@cc...
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan