"Roman Ivanov" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > > Most lines in a typical config are of the form > > some-key=some-vaue > > If the value is ASCII text, like a file path, there simply isn't anything > you could save by converting it to binary. If the value is a number, you > would get some savings, but they would be negligible for anything but very > large numbers. ( ceil(log_base_10(N)) - ceil(log_base_2(N))? Something of > that sort.) You could get large savings on booleans, but you would have to > be tricky, because memory still works in bytes. >
Good points. Although with binary, the key wouldn't necissarily need to be text. But yea, I'm probably just splitting hairs now. > Storing configs in zip files would increase boot and load times, because > applications would waste cycles on unzipping them. That is bloat of a > worse kind. I'm not sure that would be the case if the data was stored on a hard drive (as opposed to one of those flash drives), because wouldn't the cost of extra disk access typically be greater than decoding a non-top-of-the-line zip encoding? (Not that I really care all that much either way.)
