[m-rev.] for review: delete see/seen/tell/told from io.m

[Zoltan Somogyi]

2022-03-08 13:26 GMT+11:00 "Julien Fischer" <jfischer at opturion.com>:
>>> I think we might do better if we introduce two new types for holding
>>> binary data, essentially equivalent to an array of uint8 (at the target
>>> language level).  There would be two, because we would have an immutable
>>> read-only version and a mutable version.
>>
>> I am not putting my hand up for that one.
> 
> I'm happy enough to implement them.  The two things I need from this
> list are:
> 
>     1. Agreement that this is what we want to do.
>     2. Suggestions for names for the new types.

I was just going through my inbox, and saw that I have not replied to this
earlier.

1: Yes, I agree that we should have a byte array type for the use cases
for which bitmap is not well suited.

2: I *guess* that the read-only version will be more popular than the
writeable version, so I think it is more important to keep *its* name short.
Some possibilities:

- byte_array
- byte_vector
- bytes
- blob

None are perfect. The first falsely implies writeability, the second makes
it sound like one slice of a byte matrix, bytes is not precise enough, and
blob is meaningful only to people who know the term from other contexts.
Overall, my preferece is for  byte_array, but it is a weak preference.

For the writeable version, I would add a "mutable_" prefix to whatever
name we end up with for the read-only version.

Zoltan.