::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Tuesday 05 February 2002 16:18, you wrote:

> I wasn't arguing about the suitability of binary files over text files,
> I was going to leave that to Alaric to do that since he's felicitously
> just subbed :)

Hullo!

To summarise my rant:

1) The exact bit sequences used to express the fact that my email address is 
alaric@alaric-snell.com, my web site is at http://www.alaric-snell.com/, and 
I would like some pizza are surely only of minor importance to a programmer 
working with this information, who would rather just have this is a 
structure/object/list/hash/whatever containing 'name->Alaric, 
email->alaric@alaric-...'. Encodings should be handled by I/O libraries, 
dammit, not made into big complex towering bastards like XML that you can't 
help but have to work with directly!

2) Binary files are small and fast. Computer power and storage are not free. 
Most places where I've worked have had to buy lots of servers to deal with 
the load to their web sites. If they could shave 10% off of that, it'd be a 
lot of money. Not enough to hire a programmer to re-code everything in 
assembly, no, but enough to justify them using an efficient encoding library 
instead of a messy one, all else equal.

3) The benefits of being able to hand-edit data in Notepad are often 
overstated. SQL servers have perfectly usable interfaces to editing the data 
in them that can work at a level of sophistication (transactions, auditing, 
fine grained access control, etc) that is impossible with using Notepad to 
edit stuff. There is nothing 'magically readable' about text; tools for 
editing and viewing it just happen to come installed with the system instead 
of having to be added. Big deal. PNG files are more 'readable' for large 2D 
data sets than text anyway, and most systems come with readers for those (Web 
browsers) if not editors (which can be had for free). Does not having to 
download a tool to edit your data file really save that much time, and does 
this make up for *not* having a lovely specialist tool that handles the 
intricacies of keeping your file valid for you? In a text editor, I can 
really easily screw up a data file...

Everyone says 'Hey, XML is a great data format because it's easy to install 
an XML parser and start programming with it. For anything else I have to 
hand-code IO routines'. WRONG! XDR development tools come with almost all 
UNIX systems out of the box (they're used beneath NFS, for a start), and are 
nicer to use than the DOM interface!

See 'man rpcgen'.

> Simon

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software