Binary I/O on stdin/stdout?

[Bob Amen]

>From article <7678 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, by gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ):
> In article <2605 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>>ANSI can't change this for you.  ANSI is obliged to humor existing broken
>>software environments.
> 
> [...]  We could require some way to obtain binary
> streams for stdin/stdout if we thought it sufficiently useful AND if
> we could figure out a viable method for doing so.
> 
> P.S. My personal opinion, not an X3J11 official statement.

	Perhaps I'm a bit confused here but it's always been my impression
that UNIX was designed to make no distinction between binary and ASCII
(say) data.  For those of us using UNIX systems to do science, the ability
to read binary data (transparently) is a necessity.  Without that we lose
most of what I find UNIX great for...like being able to write small useful
programs that operate on data and fit them together with pipes and tees.
(There are other useful things as well.)  Why is this a problem now?  I've
been following this discussion but have not yet heard a compelling reason
to break one of the greatest advantages of UNIX.

-- 
	Bob Amen (amen at quequeg.UUCP) (+1 301 338-6329)
	Chesapeake Bay Institute/The Johns Hopkins University