Re: Data table text I/O package?

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> > Unlike Ada, XML is _not_ human-readable.
> 
> First, this has been claimed many times without even an indication
> of why this might be so. Again, compare
> 
>   <Date year = "2006" month = "December" day = "24"/>
> 
> and
> 
>   Date'(year => 2006, month => -"December", day => 24);
> 
> Could it be that you just don't like reading angle brackets?

I definitely don't like reading _any_ brackets, when I'm looking at
data.

> Do the <...> smell like C++'s template parameter brackets?

They may.  But neither of the above two notations are sensible, when I
am playing with 30 � 55k matrices.

> Again, habits? I won't say that XML *looks* nice, but it's purpose
> is not to look nice, this is not a Miss Dataformat Competition where
> you cannot win without rounded curves o.K. by the lates fashion.
> XML is supposed to support identifing data in text form.

Yes.  But for tabular data XML has much too much overhead and is thus
too difficult to read.

> > And if I want an error-correcting file format which isn't
> > human-readable, there are plenty to choose from, which are faster than
> > XML.
> 
> Such as...?
> ASN.1 perhaps?

I am not sure if ASN.1 includes error-correction, but it was one of
the options I had on my mind, when I wrote the sentence.  A much more
effective format would be based on an instantiation of Ada.Direct_IO
with some kind of checksum included in Element_Type.  My astrophysics
colleagues also have a nice format for multidimensional tables, but I
can't remember the name at the moment.

Jacob
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