Re^6: I dislike object-oriented programming in general

[BrowserUk]

a few dozen kilobytes of metadata, and then 130 megabytes of binary junk that is completely opaque to any human being.

Hmm. Let's see. 130 MB = 17,039,360 values (assuming double precision IEEE). So, if that was formatted as ASCII, assuming that same double precision is required, it would require ~20 bytes per value, ~= 325 MB to render it to the same precision in a human readable format. If we say one pair of values per line and 80 lines per page, that's ~200 reams, or 500 Kg (1/2 tonne) of cheapish printer paper. And that's before you wrap them up in the verbosity of XML.

Now, how long do you think it would take the human being to peruse that lot and pick out the anomolous pairing? And what value is there in having those values in a human readable format if no one is ever going to read them?

The point being, that to do anything meaningful with those volumes of data, it is necessary to use software.

[vrk]

Uh, sorry, I wasn't entirely clear. I didn't mean it makes sense to store some 10 or 20 million pairs of floating point values in human-readable form. There is simply a curious discrepancy between using binary data (albeit encoded in ASCII) in a file format that is supposed to be human-readable -- where readability does not really mean human-usable as such. Of course you need computers and software if you want to analyze millions of peaks.

[BrowserUk]

Okay, I get where you are coming from. Though there is something to be said for keeping meta-data together with the data it describes, and there is the benefit of being able to read the meta data (using head or similar) without parsing the entire file.