Hacker News Reader

Comment by adiabatichottub | Hacker News Reader

Text is wonderful, but note that the one keyword not found in this text is 'parse'. How much extra work is generated writing parers for text that would have been so much easier to deal with if it had just been generated in a structured binary format? You still get the pleasure of designing a new wheel with every format.

View on HN

It's not about writing a parser, it's about figuring out what the content is supposed to be in the first place. With plain text you can see what's a number, what's a string, what's an expression, etc... I'd rather try to figure out how to parse "2 7 + 3 -" than see a file with

0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x7 0x1 0x1 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x3 0x1 0x2

and try to figure out what that is all about.

Unless it's a different encoding from 50 years ago so you can't figure out how to parse 27+3 And you can easily make the opposite example: you'd rather figure out that .ext means format X that you already have an app for, where date is unambiguous courtesy of the format designers rather that make some common mistake trying to figure out where month is in 5/6/79

If it were easy to see what's a number and whats a string, type confusions a la YAML's fun wouldn't exist: Is "no" a string, a country, a boolean? Is 0 a boolean, a number, or char[48]?

This is specifically an area that "text" is quite bad and is the source of much woe. Your provided example would be parsed by most parsers today as a string, since it mixes spaces (non-numeric) and surrounds it with quotes.

In fact, given well-defined binary, it is rather simpler to turn it into "text" than the reverse. It seems like you've forgotten that "0x32 0x20 0x37 0x20 0x2A..." is literally what is in that file you would view. Plain text is, after all, just one example of a binary format.

This misunderstands what I was trying to get across. The string is the file content, not a string in a file (so: a short snippet of source code), in text format; what followed was (an attempt at) a plausible binary tokenization.

I agree that the string "no" is ambiguous (though infamous as a somewhat pathological case), but at least it can be seen in context without having to spelunk a binary definition.

is_bright_and_shiny: "no"

curt_negative_response: "no"

country_code: "no"

It does not have to be a binary format. Just a structured format, for which we can reuse an existing parser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com