On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote: > On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:01:06 -0700, Eric Brombaugh wrote: > > > Really makes > > you wonder why binary files are so popular. Probably because it's easier > > to do an fwrite()/fread() on a huge data structure in memory than to > > write text input parsers. > > Probably because binary formats promote vendor lock-in. There is a reason > why the *.doc format has never been disclosed by Microsoft.
It also causes other problems: if you just fread() a block of data into memory, it might work on one processor architecture - but it's going to cause you lots of problems with other CPU architectures - endian-ness problems, alignment problems etc. So if you're going to support more than one architecture, you *still* have to do a bunch of work to make sure data structures get loaded correctly regardless of CPU type. At which point you may as well use a text format, which makes it easier for others to work with your tools, too. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
