Re^7: I dislike object-oriented programming in general

[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.