On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Just like the rest of the computation. Relatively few command-line > computations are performed by machines, for machines, using > machine-friendly human-hostile formats.
And even most computations performed by machines for machines are done using human-friendly transmission formats. Trying to brain-storm actually human-hostile formats... let's see. There's extremely low-level protocols like IP, TCP, DNS, and X11. There are (de)compression tools like gzip, where byte size is the entire point of the utility. There's XML, of course, which isn't exactly machine-friendly, but is pretty human-hostile. And most crypto is done with byte streams rather than text. Beyond that, pretty much everything is text. Ever since I started git-managing my /etc directory, I've been seeing changes made by various programs being reflected there - in text files. Internet protocols are almost exclusively text. Unless you say otherwise, most Unix utilities consume and emit text, even when they're in "machine readable" mode - for example, a number of git commands support a "--porcelain" option that removes color codes and pretty formatting, and also uses a format that's guaranteed to be stable, but it's still text. Despite fundamentally working with bit operations and numbers, computers today are still heavily text-aligned. Might have something to do with the fact that they're programmed by humans... ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
