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From: karl AT aspodata DOT se
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] A fileformat library
In-reply-to: <6C2FA19B-9B5C-4F6E-841C-4C3031BF9D2D@noqsi.com>
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Comments: In-reply-to John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com>
   message dated "Wed, 06 Jan 2016 07:36:18 -0500."
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Date: Wed,  6 Jan 2016 14:30:50 +0100 (CET)
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John Doty:
> On Jan 6, 2016, at 4:58 AM, Levente (leventelist AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] <geda-user AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> > You can have any difftool for git, so you can do visual diffs or
> > anything what you want, independent of the file format. (as of
> > today, we HAVE visual diff for PCB)
> And then what do you do with a broken file, with a little bit of garbled
> data in it? Text is more robust.

Ack.

> > You can write your own script in whatever language, as long as it
> > has bindings for the file format,
> But that's more work.
> > which is the case.
> Not for every language. Certainly not for every text utility.

Until someone writes that library and provides all bindings, isn't this 
discussion moot ?

> > When selecting a file format I would not have such constraints like 
> > "it should be pretty for a human eye".
> Not pretty, but comprehensible without processing.

But then, it is ofther easier to understand things that is nicely
formatted.

> > CAD data is so complex, that one can (and I believe should not) parse
> > them with naked eye. For a computer, binary is much more efficient.
> It's more efficient until something breaks (and something always breaks).
...

Step is for complex cad data, and it is a text format, so your claim is 
not fully valid.

> It's more efficient if you never want to use text-oriented tools,
> but for files with lots of text data, like attributes and file
> names, I generally want to use text tools to solve some problems.
> There are thousands of tiny problems that you can efficiently address
> in this way.

It is not efficient when debugging, and even if you have binary data,
you have to validate it, don't accept data at face value.

...
> > If file format changes, you have to just change one code, and not 50+.
> Not true, because the only sane reason to change the format is to
> change something in the semantics. That means that your common
> parser's API will have to change, and everything that uses it will
> have to accommodate that change.
...

Ack.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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