Fwd: RE: Formatless files

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dimitre Novatchev <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, Aug 14, 2022 at 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RE: Formatless files
To: Roger L Costello <[email protected]>


There are many cases when we don't want "any program" to read our file. And
by "read" I mean "understand / get / extract the useful information".

Consider a file that contains the hashes of (salted) network-ids and/or
passwords of the users in an organization, or a smaller subset of this
organization.

Thanks,
Dimitre

On Sun, Aug 14, 2022 at 2:01 PM Roger L Costello <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Files in the UNIX system are formatless. That means that they are simply
> a string of characters or bytes. Any format imposed on the data is done by
> the programmer rather than by the operating system. This makes programming
> very easy for programmers."
>
> "Let me contrast to other operating systems where at file creation time a
> programmer must specify what information will be in the file, how big the
> file will be, etc. Once that is done the programmer is locked into it.
> Having locked into that kind of file, then later it becomes impossible to
> put another kind of data in that file. The analogy is to try to put a
> legal-sized document into a letter-size file. It simply won't fit."
>
> [Roger: At file creation time an XML author must specify what the
> character encoding (charset) is. Once that is done the XML document is
> locked into that charset. Having locked into that kind of charset, then
> later it becomes impossible to put data with another kind of charset in
> that file. For example, if the file is created using the UTF-8 charset,
> then later you cannot insert data in the EBCDIC charset.]
>
> "In the UNIX system you don't have this problem because data in files is
> formatless and data can be easily moved back and forth between files."
>
> "Formatless files in which the data consists solely of a stream of bytes
> that is uninterpreted by the operating simplifies life because it means
> that any program can process any file. When you combine this with the
> concept of pipelining or stream processing, it makes UNIX an extremely
> powerful programming tool."
>
> Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Catherine Ann Brooks
>
> https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=707
>
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-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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