rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) (10/21/90)
In article <1990Oct20.003222.25439@athena.mit.edu> scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes: >My $64,000 question is: why are so many poor souls condemned to >try to read and write binary data files? My $0.02 answer is: Using a binary (or other fixed-length) format makes random access easy; and allocating records large enough to handle the largest textual representation of the data may be impractical. (OK, so you could do the equivalent of uuencode on the data and it wouldn't blow up too much.) For sequential files where space and speed aren't issues, text formats are great; otherwise, a binary format is probably good. All IMHO, of course. Anton +---------------------------+------------------+-------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison | +---------------------------+------------------+-------------+