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Re: [ddlm-group] EOF keyword?

imgCIF is headed in the direction of multiple images per file, for
thumbnails, crystal images and such.  We discarded the header followed
by binary approach some time ago because of that.

=====================================================
  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769

                  +1-631-244-3035
                  yaya@dowling.edu
=====================================================

On Sat, 31 Oct 2009, Joe Krahn wrote:

> Although my preference is to avoid extra complexity, one addition that
> may be worth considering is an EOF keyword.
>
> One common way to deal with binary data is to put a human-readable ASCII
> header, followed by raw binary data. A file could have a "normal" UTF-8
> CIF2 header, an EOF marker, then binary data. The advantage is that the
> binary data needs no encoding/decoding, and it avoids any conflicts
> between character encoding. The big disadvantage is that it really only
> works well for a single binary object per file.
>
> Perl has an __END__ keyword. It is often used to insert text
> documentation at the end, without having to worry about escape codes,
> etc. Maybe some people will think this is useful, or maybe not.
>
> Joe Krahn
> _______________________________________________
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> ddlm-group@iucr.org
> http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/ddlm-group
>
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