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Re:The Rule of Silence (2006) by TeMPOraL on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @08:00AM (#13166440)
> ...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation?

Yes, basically. Someone in power should just pick any format - modified JSON (without the integers are really IEEE754 floats stupidity), s-expressions, whatever - and make standard deserializers part of the system library.

Re:The Rule of Silence (2006) by mbrock on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @09:20AM (#13166914)
Heh heh, "someone in power." Who would that be?

There's no authority to complain to about all this...

Structured text formats come and go: S-expressions, SGML, XML, JSON, "modified JSON", etc etc etc...

Fortunately the Unix tools work the same with any byte stream, pretty much, so they've survived gloriously since the 1970s.

That's kind of the whole deal with "worse is better."

Re:The Rule of Silence (2006) by TeMPOraL on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @10:29AM (#13167461)
> There's no authority to complain to about all this...

Whoever accepts patches to base UNIX system libraries would be a good start.

> Fortunately the Unix tools work the same with any byte stream, pretty much, so they've survived gloriously since the 1970s.

So would a structured text format, except you wouldn't be discarding and then recreating semantic information at every junction of a pipe.

Re:The Rule of Silence (2006) by module0000 on Tuesday December 13, 2016 @11:31AM (#13168048)
> Whoever accepts patches to base UNIX system libraries would be a good start.

That can be you! Get to work, or pay someone else to get to work if the skills required aren't in your set.