4 ms·

Encodings do not make text a binary format. This pedantry is uncalled for.

Aaargh20318 9y ago
I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And yet, everyone agrees there is, and has no problem telling its case from other formats, even if they're all 0s and 1s underneath.
  - wodenokoto 9y ago
    That is not true. Guessing encoding is really, really difficult, and you can easily end up reading a file with an uncommon Japanese encoding as an Chinese encoding and end up with subtitle errors. Plain text is anything but plain.
  - madhadron 9y ago
    American programmers with little exposure to the world beyond their personal milieu agree that there is. The rest of the world stringently disagrees.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      I'm not an american programmer, and we used to have 2-3 of our own encodings in my country (or "codepages" as it was referred to back in the day) before utf-8 took care of that. Because of that having to handle international text was the default from since I started professionally programming. So, nope. Still, missing the point. The difference between plain text formats and binary formats is not that plain text files do no consist of bytes or don't need an encoding to read them. It's being able to work on them with a plain text editor, and being based on actual written text -- as opposed to packed bytes and custom (proprietary or not) formats.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And I'm just saying it's pedantry. 'plain text' is an umbrella term for 'not binary'. > I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse. Binary files are definitely faster and more compact. And tools such as google protocol buffers makes passing information very convenient and efficient. Unfortunately, most APIs out there use JSON, so we just have to live with it. Maybe the widespread adoption of JSON and plain text APIs is a reflection of how we, as developers, have become more likely to optimize for our own development process rather than the actual hardware (see all the electron craze).
jl6 9y ago
I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings, to the point where text can even become an attack vector. A fully featured UTF-8 parsing and rendering engine is a sophisticated thing. Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? Not as much as it matters which requires the more complex code to process.
- rollcat 9y ago
  > A fully featured UTF-8 parsing and rendering engine is a sophisticated thing. No, UTF8 decoding is trivial, you can do it in a few dozen lines in just about any language. It's Unicode that is a complex and moving target. But you can also just choose to implement a sane subset of Unicode for your application. Recommended reading: http://cat-v.org/ http://cat-v.org/, https://github.com/cls/libutf https://github.com/cls/libutf
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. Encoding a number in binary takes 4 or 8 bytes. Encoding it in plain text (ASCII or Unicode) takes as many bytes as there are digits, plus one for the sign / decimal separator. If you're talking about ASCII/Unicode, you're not talking about text/binary. > ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings I don't disagree with you, but Unicode is not binary. > Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? They're both text.

Aaargh20318 9y ago

I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse.

coldtea 9y ago
>I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And yet, everyone agrees there is, and has no problem telling its case from other formats, even if they're all 0s and 1s underneath.
- wodenokoto 9y ago
  That is not true. Guessing encoding is really, really difficult, and you can easily end up reading a file with an uncommon Japanese encoding as an Chinese encoding and end up with subtitle errors. Plain text is anything but plain.
- madhadron 9y ago
  American programmers with little exposure to the world beyond their personal milieu agree that there is. The rest of the world stringently disagrees.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    I'm not an american programmer, and we used to have 2-3 of our own encodings in my country (or "codepages" as it was referred to back in the day) before utf-8 took care of that. Because of that having to handle international text was the default from since I started professionally programming. So, nope. Still, missing the point. The difference between plain text formats and binary formats is not that plain text files do no consist of bytes or don't need an encoding to read them. It's being able to work on them with a plain text editor, and being based on actual written text -- as opposed to packed bytes and custom (proprietary or not) formats.
rootlocus 9y ago
> I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And I'm just saying it's pedantry. 'plain text' is an umbrella term for 'not binary'. > I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse. Binary files are definitely faster and more compact. And tools such as google protocol buffers makes passing information very convenient and efficient. Unfortunately, most APIs out there use JSON, so we just have to live with it. Maybe the widespread adoption of JSON and plain text APIs is a reflection of how we, as developers, have become more likely to optimize for our own development process rather than the actual hardware (see all the electron craze).

jl6 9y ago

I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings, to the point where text can even become an attack vector. A fully featured UTF-8 parsing and rendering engine is a sophisticated thing. Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? Not as much as it matters which requires the more complex code to process.

rollcat 9y ago
> A fully featured UTF-8 parsing and rendering engine is a sophisticated thing. No, UTF8 decoding is trivial, you can do it in a few dozen lines in just about any language. It's Unicode that is a complex and moving target. But you can also just choose to implement a sane subset of Unicode for your application. Recommended reading: http://cat-v.org/ http://cat-v.org/, https://github.com/cls/libutf https://github.com/cls/libutf
rootlocus 9y ago
> I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. Encoding a number in binary takes 4 or 8 bytes. Encoding it in plain text (ASCII or Unicode) takes as many bytes as there are digits, plus one for the sign / decimal separator. If you're talking about ASCII/Unicode, you're not talking about text/binary. > ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings I don't disagree with you, but Unicode is not binary. > Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? They're both text.