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From: Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
Subject: Re: Tokenizing a string in Ada
Date: 2000/11/03
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In article <3a030814@rsl2.rslnet.net>,
  "Tom Hargraves" <tharg@vtcinet.com> wrote:
> Many many many times I have seen Ada (and other) programmers saving
> data structures in files, the more astute save them in human readable
> form, unless there is a pressing performance hit.
>
> I have seen just as many different ways to save this data, from a
> variety of tags, indenture, tuples etc. Is there not some standard way
> of doing this? If there isn't should there be?

One of my favorite quotes of the new era is, "The best thing about
standards is that there are so many to choose from".

In many cases CSV is an ideal format for tabular data. There's no
offical ISO standard (that I know of), but its support is nothing short
of awesome. Its understood by nearly every spreadsheet and database
program, and by oddles of other data visualization and manipulation
tools. Plus, its fairly human readable.

Compare this with XML, which has a many dialects as developers, is only
understood by a few newer tools, and is about as human-readable as C
source code. Perhaps XML is a bit of a breakthrough for data that isn't
table-based, but its not a panacea.

I'd like to see someone submit XML recognizers for OpenToken, just so we
can say we have it. But apparently no-one has felt the need to build it
yet. CSV was one of the first things added.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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