Re: Data table text I/O package?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message
news:42c5e4de$0$10818$9b4e6d93@newsread4.arcor-online.net...
> Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
> > I
> > kinda think the entire data-in-a-text file thing is pretty silly).
>
> It's not that silly when your data is actually text, though.

That would be one of the weird special cases. It's not that unusual to have
some text components in your data, but for *all* of the data to be text is
pretty rare. For instance, in a web log, the URL is text, but most of the
other components (access time, result code, IP address) are really values of
one sort or another. They can be represented as text, but any significant
manipulation ought to be done on the value (strongly typed, if you're using
Ada).

And I generally don't think of raw text (like an e-mail message) as data.
Text and data are usually different things. You're welcome to view text as
data if you want, but that's not at all the sorts of applications that I've
been thinking about here.

                              Randy.