In article <405cdbae@news.povray.org>, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> 
wrote:

> Christopher James Huff wrote:
> > Because it's harder to read and write binary data in a portable way. 
> 
> No it's not.

Hmm...yes it is. To write "1.5" in a portable way in text only requires 
writing those three characters. In binary you need to write it byte by 
byte in a known floating point format and byte ordering, regardless of 
what the native machine format is.


> I'd even go so far as to bet there are more uses of 
> portable binary formats than portable text-based formats, once you get 
> off the internet.

They certainly are more useful, but that doesn/t make them any easier to 
read and write.


> Try ASN.1, for example. And I only know of two image 
> formats that aren't binary, and neither is designed to be read by a 
> person, yet all are quite portable. You just have to specify stuff like 
> the order and size of multi-byte integers.

You forget floating point values, but even multi-byte integers involve 
more complexity than text format integers.


> Anyway, XML *is* a binary format. It's UTF-8 by default.

UTF-8 is an encoding for text. XML is text. You can't directly write a 
binary floating point value in it, for example...you have to convert it 
to a human-readable textual form, even if it'll never be seen by humans. 
This is trivial to do with the standard C or C++ libraries, but there 
are no standard ways to portably write multi-byte integers or floating 
point values. You have to write all that stuff yourself.


> > I thought it sounded great...up until that last part.
> 
> Or, as I saw someone say elsewhere, XML is a hammer looking for a 
> nail... and finding fingers.

Sounds appropriate.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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