Any high-level programming language typically provides a zip library with random access to the compressed files.
My reply was to the first post, which was brainstorming "a methodology to package files into a single file for distribution", with a simplified way for the program to load its bundled resources. This has been common since MS Visual Studio in the early 90s, but many things have changed since then. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, with some of the ideas expressed in the braindump above. I've explained why that "single file" fetish has no practical benefits, and would result in every user downloading the same resources over again whenever one thing in your app was updated.
