Little problem with sizeof on PC

[Noam Mendelson]

In article <ENAG.91Apr24175955 at maud.ifi.uio.no> enag at ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:
>In article <1991Apr24.031700.17233 at agate.berkeley.edu>, Noam Mendelson writes:
>
>   If you want to take up disk space unnecessarily and decrease
>   program performance, sure, you can create ASCII data files.
>   Portability will be limited to the Intel 80x86 line, however, if
>   you opt to use the binary method.
>
>If you want to take up debugging time unnecessarily and decrease
>programmer performance, sure, you can create binary data files.

Decrease programmer performance?  Read()'ing in the data structure
causes a lot less headache than trying to fscanf() in the data
from an ASCII data file.

>Portability and debug-ability will be be unlimited, however, if you
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>opt to use the readable data file method.

So I assume you've never had any problems doing I/O on ASCII files.
ASCII data files produce a whole new set of problems that don't exist
with the binary format, ranging from the fscanf() syntax to the
record size.

Portability will be dramatically increased, although not unlimited.

-- 
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| Noam Mendelson   ..!ucbvax!web!c60b-1eq       | "I haven't lost my mind, |
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| University of California at Berkeley          |  somewhere."             |