Wish: add back READ/binary and WRITE/binary

[Siskin-Bot]

Submitted by: Oldes

If there is something what I must change in almost every old Rebol2 script to have it working with Rebol3 and or Red, than it is this change of read and write refinements.

Red does not have /string refinement and instead has /as encoding, which may be also fine to support. I know, that this R3 change was done to have read/write as low level, but I believe that we don't have to be so low and to be limited only with binary.

I think that it is ok to keep the default binary behaviour, but it would be also nice to have a chance to refine the required actions. Especially when read/write may be used for more scheme types than files or http request.

Related wish: metaeducation#2007

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^{Imported from: metaeducation#2382}

Comments:

Rgchris commented on Jun 17, 2019:

Related blog posts: Pruning down READ and WRITE, More about Port layers - the OSI Model (the compromise being Finalizing READ and WRITE with many strong opinions in comments)

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Hostilefork commented on Jun 18, 2019:

This still seems to me to be a big open area.

I think if I had to pick a side, I would say keep READ and WRITE as byte-oriented, then let LOAD and SAVE bring in higher level decodings.

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Hostilefork added Status.important, Type.note, Type.wish, Ren.important on Aug 10, 2019

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[Oldes]

I've added /binary refinement into read and write actions in this commit: Oldes/Rebol3@07379a6
where I use it in HTTP protocol to get raw binary data without automatic text conversion.

The thing is, that I don't want to load any url (which may contain images and complex markup documents, which I don't want to decode), but still want to see textual content in console without need to do additional steps.