Re: [oll-user] Finally, the revised instructions - please review!

[Marc S. <ma...@ou...>]

On 1/29/2014 9:27 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
> Am 29.01.2014 17:21, schrieb Marc Sabatella:
>> Except of course, if there*are*  advantages to binary, nothing
>> in these challenges is likely to expose it.
> I can't imagine any advantage of a binary format.

I was being charitable :-).  But no, there *could* be a few advantages, 
depending on one's priorities:

1) probably could be optimized to save/load faster
2) by creating a system in which the user would be effectively prevented 
from editing the file by hand, the developer has more control over the 
input, and can hence be more lax with error checking and the verbosity 
of error messages that are generated
3) the opaque-ness of the format could be an advantage if one wants to 
protect it as proprietary

Of course, #1 is probably inconsequential in practice, #2 is really just 
an excuse for laziness (and arguably counterproductive in the long run - 
as a developer, I *like* that I can examine and edit these files), and 
most in the open source world would reject #3 out of hand.

Marc