Re: [PROPOSAL] Drop XML from .svn/entries

Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 00:53 +0100, Julian Foad wrote:
>> Is this format that you are playing with one that you made up? Introducing Yet
>> Another File Format is a bad thing in general, however simple it seems to be.
>> There is significant but unquantifiable value in using a standard format.
>
> I think this argument is overblown. A file format which appears to be
> simple often really is, and the code necessary to parse it is often less
> than the code necessary to interface to an XML library.

I have to agree. Although it isn't that common, one of my first programming
jobs involved a package (warehouse/order entry system) that spewed
pipe-delimited as its default output. The one big advantage was that the pipe
character was not used in the data itself, so there was never any escaping to
worry about. Here, we don't have that luxury, but it is much simpler to split
on a single character (modulo escapes) than any other file format. Human
readability can easily be produced with a quick one-liner in the scripting
language of your choice.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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