On 4-8-2018 15:06, 'River~~' river14april@... [firebird-support]
wrote:

> You are pedantically correct but...
>
> ALL storage in ALL modern computers is in binary.

This may sounds pedantic, but it is not in my opinion. I have seen
enough systems storing binary data by encoding it using hex or base64
before storing it in **binary** data types (binary columns, byte arrays,
etc). That is unnecessary and needlessly inefficient, and usually stems
from confusing presentation with storage.

> When we declare a field as integer, char, octet, etc we are specifying
> two things: how it is presented and what manipulation we can do on it.

And yet people store date and integers in string columns, which is still
'binary' in storage, but yet inefficient because it is the wrong type.

> To say an octet is in hex is no more wrong than to say some number is
> stored as a float. It's all just a bucket of bits. Hex or float or
> Integer are always presentation

No, if you say it is stored in hex, it conveys the idea that the value
stored is like '0A' (that is bytes 0x0041 assuming ASCII) instead of the
single byte 0x0A.

The presentation might be hex, but the actual storage is not.

Mark
--
Mark Rotteveel