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Bug 19983 - Confusion between bytes and byte pointers
Summary: Confusion between bytes and byte pointers
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Encoding (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P1 critical
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Anne
QA Contact: sideshowbarker+encodingspec
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-11-16 10:15 UTC by Martin Dürst
Modified: 2012-11-16 12:01 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Martin Dürst 2012-11-16 10:15:57 UTC
The spec contains, in several places, the following instruction:

"Let byte be byte pointer."

This mixes up bytes and byte pointers. A byte pointer is informally defined as "The byte pointer is initially zero, pointing to the first byte in the stream. It cannot be negative. It can be increased and decreased to point to other bytes in the stream."

So in a stream of 10000 bytes, byte pointer could be 6789, but trying to assign that to byte would obviously not work.

This should be fixed (in all instances) to:

"Let byte be the value at byte pointer." (or something similar)

The spec should also be carefully checked for other errors of similar nature.