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From: s0h7390@cs.tamu.edu (Salman Halim)
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 comp.os.msdos.programmer,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.modula2,comp.lang.pascal,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.basic.visual,comp.lang.basic.misc,comp.lang.basic.visual.misc,comp.lang.cobol
Subject: Re: Data Format Brainstorm
Date: 6 Jan 1995 12:09:13 GMT
Organization: Texas A&M Computer Science Department, College Station, TX
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References: <cacclin.789345537@vanbc>
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Date: 1995-01-06T12:09:13+00:00
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In article <cacclin.789345537@vanbc>,
Stephen Cacclin <cacclin@vanbc.wimsey.com> wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>I am looking for some helpful input from the various comp.* communities. 
>
>Basically I want to know how various databases, languages, protocols etc.
>store different data types. In other words, how are signed/unsigned integers,
>floating point numbers, date types, booleans etc. written to disk?  
>
>Any database, language, machine type, protocol or other method is welcome! 
>Please feel free to share your most obscure references... 
>
>*** Please respond with email since I am polling a number of groups. 
*blind ignorance to this*

>
>If I receive enough input, I will post a complete overview. 
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Stephen Cacclin

hmm..  i don't really know how databases do their stuff, but i can't think of
an example where i was able to issue a command to pascal which was the
equivalent of:  store this array of boolean to disk in file bool.dat.  how it's
stored is up to the programmer.  some store it as text file (simple ascii on
pc), others perform compression for large data, especially numeric or string.

the SOURCE file on most pc compilers is stored simply as an ascii file (which
means you could edit it just about any bloody where you so choose and then
compile it using the language compiler).

what DOES differ on occasion is how data types are stored in MEMORY (eg.
integers take two bytes, longints take four, a byte obviously takes one etc.
etc.) -- fun fun fun. . .

hope i've completely babbled on uselessly and made no sense at all,

salman.