Per Bothner wrote:
> Well, yes.  The points I'm making are:
> * One layers text i/o on top of binary i/o.

Not in general. That's the easiest way to do it on the "all files are
streams of bytes" used by Unix and Windows, but those aren't the only
operating systems in the worlds. Many systems still use record-based
files and other oddities where you usually implement "binary" I/O on top
of the text or record interface to create the illusion of a byte stream.
--
Bradd W. Szonye
http://www.szonye.com/bradd