On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
>
> you: "it's easy to screw up when working with ASCII strings"
> me: "tossers will find a way to screw up on anything, no matter what it is;
> see example of tosser screwing up on plain arithmetics"
> you: "use of ASCII wouldn't help them in that case"
Ages and ages ago (ok, not that long ago, really) I remember reading a
vaguely similar arugment on Fidonet.
The argument was largely over the format of the "next gen" message
format - RFC822 came up a lot, and the ensuing "binary header" vs "ASCII
header" arguments would follow.
All I really learned from that was, "parsing email headers is more
complicated than people suspect" (binary or ascii, doesn't matter), and that
ASCII has one advantage that more compact/binary/etc formats lack:
When the ASCII file/header/partition table/whatever gets fscked
beyond all recognition, I can fix the goddamn thing with a text editor.
That last part is the reason most people utterly detest things like the
Windows registry and prefer the (imo, at least), much saner /etc design
prevalent in Linux distributions.
-- Ryan Anderson sometimes Pug Majere- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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