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From: Chris RL Morgan <mihalis@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: In defence of plain ascii files ( was Re: Interface/Implementation
 (was Re: Design by Contract)
Date: 1997/09/01
Message-ID: <5ucep2$kp4@dfw-ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>#1/1
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References: <34046FAD.52BFA1D7@eiffel.com>
 <EFLp4n.HJC.0.-s@inmet.camb.inmet.com> <3406A707.787D@dmu.ac.uk>
Organization: Netcom
X-NETCOM-Date: Sun Aug 31  1:56:34 PM CDT 1997
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-08-31T13:56:34-05:00
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In article <3406A707.787D@dmu.ac.uk>,
	Graham Perkins <gperkins@dmu.ac.uk> wrote:
[SNIP]
>But really, this whole discussion indicates to me that we are still in
>the stone
>age with our tools.  Why are we still talking about "files"?!! 
>Presumably stored
>in DOS or Unix directories ?!!  Uggghhhh!!!

You don't work for a tool vendor by any chance do you?

Seriously though every time you move away from human readable plan text files you risk losing some flexibility or the use of some tool or other. Yes ascii is the lowest common denominator but nearly every tool in, for example, a Unix system will work with it. Not only the compiler, but also grep, awk, perl, sed, gdb, diff, cat, tr, more, less, all will do a simple albeit mediocre job of understanding your files. For example if the IDE with a new compiler system is great but third party debuggers or memory leak tools can't show me my code as I step through it line by line then it loses, end of story. Source code navigation tools in a commercial product would have to be _very_ good to make me by them when I have gnatf and emacs for free.

To my mind non-ascii files are uncivil, they are needed in many cases but where they aren't people should have the decency to work with ascii so that when their software goes wrong I can see what they're up to. Of course this is part of what Unix is about and I can see other people don't agree. Last time I looked at Solaris for example it still starts up simply by running a load of text files (scripts) in the lexical order of their filenames (something like rc1, rc2 etc) - simple but effective. Perhaps if we tell them we use a "lightweight, platform-independent, vendor-neutral, open, standards-based interchange format" for our "repository" they'll like it better ;^)

Chris