Re:Formatting floating point numbers
by bunderbunder on Friday June 14, 2019 @08:06AM
(#20182273)
I'm also not convinced they help human readability that much.
e.g., when I've done my own binary formats, I typically also create a "dump" utility that converts the file to a readable text dump. I find the ergonomics of this are just fine for my purposes.
less somefile.json
isn't that much easier to type than
dumpdat somefile.dat | less
That said, different purposes are different. I'm not so worried about human-readability for short-lived stuff, but, if you're talking about data that may be sitting around for decades, then the human readability question becomes something you might better characterize as "future comprehensibility": If someone's trying to dust off 50-year-old business data from deep in the archives, they're going to have a much higher chance of success if it's CSV files than if it's in some custom binary format whose documentation was lost 40 years ago.
e.g., when I've done my own binary formats, I typically also create a "dump" utility that converts the file to a readable text dump. I find the ergonomics of this are just fine for my purposes.
isn't that much easier to type than That said, different purposes are different. I'm not so worried about human-readability for short-lived stuff, but, if you're talking about data that may be sitting around for decades, then the human readability question becomes something you might better characterize as "future comprehensibility": If someone's trying to dust off 50-year-old business data from deep in the archives, they're going to have a much higher chance of success if it's CSV files than if it's in some custom binary format whose documentation was lost 40 years ago.