Re: Binary Data - possible topic for joint session

On 6 Nov 2009, at 19:24, Brendan Eich wrote:

> On Nov 6, 2009, at 10:44 AM, Dean Landolt wrote:
>
>> Just in case some of you weren't aware, the CommonJS group has done  
>> quite a bit of work and (bikeshedding) on this topic. Here's a link  
>> to the wiki:
>>
>> http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Binary
>>
>> If nothing else there's quite a bit of prior art collected which  
>> should inform the conversation. I know the Binary/B proposal has  
>> the implementation momentum, but I don't know exactly what the  
>> status is. I haven't been closely following the evolution of these  
>> binary specs too closely but since it seems that nearly everyone  
>> else from the group is off to jsconf.eu I figured I ought to toss  
>> this out there.
>
> Thanks, I had forgotten about commonjs.org, having once paid better  
> attention.
>
> Kris did a good job with Binary/B (although I do not see the point  
> of the .get method additions) -- I didn't look at the other  
> proposals yet.
>
> /be

Binary/B feels largely right, but it has a few too many methods from  
Array simply because Array had them for my taste, specifically things  
like sort, reduce, shift, unshift etc.

Conceptually: why would you want to sort an array of bytes? There are  
certainly classes of operations that I think should just be done via  
b.toArray().X rather than directly on the blob.

As a community (CommonJS) we'd be more than happy to go forward with a  
binary spec that came from (or at least has the blessing of) the ES  
groups

-ash