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Re: binary interface


From: Keisuke Nishida
Subject: Re: binary interface
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2001 23:37:54 -0500
User-agent: Wanderlust/2.4.0 (Rio) SEMI/1.13.7 (Awazu) FLIM/1.13.2 (Kasanui) Emacs/21.0.96 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) MULE/5.0 (SAKAKI)

At Thu, 01 Mar 2001 22:27:56 -0500,
Keisuke Nishida wrote:
> 
> A text representation might be better because it could reduce
> file size, but I'm not sure how much it would.

It would be feasible to choose an intermix solution.  We could
use the following semi-binary format:

  <object> = <integer> | <string> | <list> | <smob> | ...
  <integer> = [0-9]+ ' '
  <string>  = "s" <integer> [a-z...]+
  <list>    = "(" <object>+ ")"
  <smob>    = "o" <smob-name> <smob-data>
  ...

Example:

  Text format:         (1 "foo")            9 bytes
  Semi-binary format:  (1 s3 foo)          10 bytes
  Binary format:       [cons][1][#1][cons][#2][()][string][foo\0]  32 bytes

The semi-binary format is much shorter than the binary format,
while being very friendly to the reader.  If I/O is much slower
than CPU, the semi-binary format above should be better than
the current binary format.  Should we try it?



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