[erlang-questions] byte() vs. char() use in documentation

[James Churchman]

more of a question than an actual answer, but in erlang can erlang strings ( therefore io-lists) be utf-16?

I assume that binaries are obviously only ever utf8 representation, but a list of ints can obviously exceed number above 255..

so maybe (??) the answer is

a) iolist CAN be a  char() (.. this is surely especially true if the data is only being messages threw erlang from other systems)

b) the binary to list are a bit less easy

basically it can't be a char(), because it will always have started off as an 8bit ( utf8 ) representation so it will always come back as a list of byte() but in the general case, it's returning an io-list and that can be a char()

is this correct? and in that case does that make the bif's xml doc file in fact correct?

James

On 28 Apr 2011, at 17:26, Kostis Sagonas wrote:

> In the Erlang documentation, the language of types and specs makes a clear distinction between the following two types:
> 
>    byte() :: 0..255
>    char() :: 0..16#10ffff
> 
> See http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/typespec.html#id72693
> 
> I think that nowadays there are very good reasons to have this distinction.
> 
> 
> In trying to fix a bug today, I happened to notice that some key types of Erlang are inconsistent with this view in the Erlang/OTP documentation (In http://erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html), most notably:
> 
>    iolist() :: [char() | binary() | iolist()]
> 
>  binary_to_list(Binary) -> [char()]
>  binary_to_list(Binary, Start, Stop) -> [char()]
>  bitstring_to_list(Bitstring) -> [char()|bitstring()]
> 
> and:
> 
>    BitstringList :: [BitstringList | bitstring() | char()]
> 
> which actually triggered this mail.
> 
> I think all the occurrences of char() above should read byte() instead.
> Right?
> 
> If yes, could somebody at OTP (or some kind volunteer) please clean up this mess?  (I can provide a fix for the documentation of the 'erlang' module if you want me to.)
> 
> Kostis
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