From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-27 16:56:14
On Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at 10:48 PM, rameysb wrote:
>
>
> also the rational for using text for numbers - is portability from
> machine to machine. binary portability would be a huge hassle and
> never be complete. Its bad enough that there are little and big
> endien machines, floating point formats vary from machine to
> machine. I believe that the only practical way to make archives
> portable across machines to use text files.
>
> Robert Ramey
>
No, there are other formats like XDR that can be used. My
files for storage of a "checkpoint" are often >100 MB in
size, I can't grow that to 3-4 times the size just because
a library requires text.
Any serialization library should allow various data formats,
binary or text, otherwise it will be of very limited use.
Matthias