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Ascii records have worked better than json, xml, s-expressions (better as in provide the same bang for a lot less buck) in every case I've used them for. I hav

• hnlmorg 6y ago
  ASCII records have their own limitations though: - They can be as easily edited by hand like other serialisation formats which use printable characters as their deliminators - It's not clearly defined how you'd use them for non-tabulated data (such as JSON, XML, S-Expressions) - There isn't any standard for escaping control characters - They're harder to differentiate between unserialised binary formats - They can't be used as a primitive like JSON is to Javascript and S-Expressions is to Lisp. And if we're both honest, reducing the serialisation overhead doesn't gain you anything when working in the command line. It's a hard enough sell getting websites to support BSON and at least there, there is a tangible benefit of scale. Not that I'm dismissing ASCII records, they would have been better than the whitespace mess we currently have in POSIX shells. However I don't agree ASCII records are better that current JSON nor S-Expressions.