binary data files

[Herman Rubin]

In article <12546 at ut-emx.UUCP>, nather at ut-emx.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
< same basic data acquisition program -- binary back when digital data
< cassettes were new and floppy disks held a massive 160KB, and ascii
< when things loosened up a bit.  Believe me, ascii is better:

			......................

> Bad things:
> 
> 1. Files take a bit longer to read in, since conversion from ascii is now
> necessary, but it's a small percentage of the total read time.
> 
> 2. Files are larger.
> 
> 3. There are no other bad things.

There is another bad thing.  We may not have a good ASCII representation for
the data.  One example is a multi-font system.  Another example is floating
point data; there is no standard floating point binary, and conversion to and
from decimal is a source of roundoff errors, which may even be serious.

-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin at l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)