Re: gEDA-user: n00b question: English - Metric connections

[Dylan Smith <dyls@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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.


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