Re: Draft of Binary module

As Christian pointed out there are indeed xs:byte types in XQuery. Its been
a long week for me so apologies for the earlier confusion.

But I think my question is still valid why octets as a sequence of
integers? Would a sequence of xs:byte not be better?
On 13 Mar 2013 22:11, "Christian Grün" <christian.gruen@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Adam,
>
> >>> An octet is implicitly in Base 8, so why would I then want to
> >>> manipulate it as thought it were Base 10 (but without
> >>> converting it to Base 10). This just doesnt make sense to me -
>
> In our analog BaseX function [1], we return items of type xs:byte
> instead of xs:integer. xs:unsignedByte could have been a more
> convenient alternative. I agree that a byte sequence takes much less
> space than a full integer sequence. On the other hand, most XPath
> functions work with integers, which is why you will usually end up
> with a 32bit representation of your value anyway. From the
> implementor’s perspective, I believe it should usually be possible to
> find memory-saving optimizations for both variants; but it would be
> interesting to hear more about other implementations.
>
> > bin:binary-to-octets(xs:hexBinary("FF")) + 1 would give me (256)
>
> The same will actually happen when you are working with bytes, as your
> byte value will implicitly be cast to an integer:
>
>   xs:unsignedByte(255) + 1 → 256
>
> You could limit the result to the lowest eight bits, as it is done in
> other languages:
>
> – XPath: binary:and( xs:unsignedByte(255) + 1, 255) → 0
> – Java/C style: ((byte) 255 + 1) & 255
>
> Christian
>
> [1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Conversion_Module#convert:binary-to-bytes
>