On 8-jun-2006, at 11:13, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
But it's a clear trade-off between efficient representation and
complexity for the developer - we've had this debate once already
in this thread, I think. The more complex the representation, the
harder it is to code correctly and debug.
Simple/complex isn't the same as text/binary. I'm pretty sure a
programmer armed with nothing more than a standard issue C compiler
and the basic libraries that come with it, would have a harder time
parsing XML than something like the DNS protocol. But my point was
that the resulting code would be slower. I know it's very old-
fashioned to even consider such things, but there are places where
performance is important beyond just philosophical objections
against bloat.
A little post script to this discussion: I wrote a few small test
programs in C to evaluate the performance of reading integers from a
text file using <stdio.h> versus doing the same with direct read()s
from a binary file. The difference is between two and three orders of
magnitude. See http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1146
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