On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Dean Abramson wrote:
> ASCII text file. We've managed to compress all this into 80K of data
> by putting it into an exe. It's much quicker to retrieve this way as
> well....much, much quicker!
Well of course, but in the Unix world we like to have standard
human readable formats for data like this even though we usually
put them into some database format and use an API for exactly the
reasons you describe. Examples include sendmail aliases,
password & group files, and termcaps among numerous others. The
fundamental rule, though, is that the database is generated from
the human readable text, not the other way around. The
convenience should be obvious for databases that change from time
to time, and the Unicode property tables do fall in that
category.
-john
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT