Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik
From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: binary data files
Summary: What about the problem of representation?
Message-ID: <1271@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 30 Apr 89 13:44:12 GMT
References: <10946@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <12546@ut-emx.UUCP>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 25

In article <12546@ut-emx.UUCP>, nather@ut-emx.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
< same basic data acquisition program -- binary back when digital data
< cassettes were new and floppy disks held a massive 160KB, and ascii
< when things loosened up a bit.  Believe me, ascii is better:

			......................

> Bad things:
> 
> 1. Files take a bit longer to read in, since conversion from ascii is now
> necessary, but it's a small percentage of the total read time.
> 
> 2. Files are larger.
> 
> 3. There are no other bad things.

There is another bad thing.  We may not have a good ASCII representation for
the data.  One example is a multi-font system.  Another example is floating
point data; there is no standard floating point binary, and conversion to and
from decimal is a source of roundoff errors, which may even be serious.

-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)