At 12:01 PM -0400 4/5/01, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
>On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
>
> > According to Deven T. Corzine:
> > > I see the value in having a readable format, but is
> > > it necessarily preferable as the native format?
> >
> > I think so. I like having all my normal tools (find, grep,
> > etc.) work, without a lot of translation rigamarole.
>
>Text-based formats definitely have a convenience factor and
>a transparency that's nice, but you're also taking a
>performance/efficiency hit, to some degree or another. Is it
>possible to have your cake and eat it too?
For what it's worth, in the days of NeXTSTEP, objects were
stored in things called "NIBs". These were binary files for
efficiency reasons, but I have the impression that many
developers felt they would have been better as plain-text
files of some format.
Going with binary formats makes more sense if you know you
will be isolated to a specific architecture, but if these
files are going to be the same across many architectures
(little-endian vs big-endian, 32bit vs 64bit, etc), then
the program needs to be careful when reading/writing that
binary info anyway. So, going to some plain-text format
isn't all that much more of a performance hit.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:28 2006