[HECnet] CSV Proposal

-----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner- hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist Sent: 19 May 2013 17:34 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Cc: Brian Hechinger Subject: Re: [HECnet] CSV Proposal On 2013-05-19 18:14, Brian Hechinger wrote: On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 05:02:18PM +0100, Robert Jarratt wrote: Well, if the separator is | then it isn't a CSV file :-) While I do understand the origins of the term CSV, the C really doesn stand for character. Tabs are used quite commonly as well as commas. Any character is valid, so long as it's accepted by all consumers of said file. The C standing for comma is antiquated and outdated and should be changed. In my not so humble opinion, anyway. :) He says, to a crowd of people running antiquated and outdated software and hardware... :-D Anyway, while I think I agree that technically, C stands for comma, I also think | is a better separator in this case. Feel free to call it anything. The acronym for the format is less important. We could call it BSV then. I didn't want to start a big debate about this, it was just a little joke. I would be more than happy to use the pipe symbol as the separator. I have no issue with this except that allowing the columns to appear in any order, while nice and flexible, makes it harder to write the software. It does not seem worth the effort to have that flexibility given the low enthusiasm for writing this software, so a simplification would be to fix the column order. It really isn't that hard to write. I've implemented such a thing in many languages (including very stupid ones) and it is *always* worth the effort. It wouldn't be a big effort for me on the platforms I write for today. It would be harder for me on platforms I programmed a long time ago (or even never in the case of RSX) and never having programmed for Datatrieve, but that is precisely why I would like to do it, although I am not at all sure about the RSX hurdle. Is there a language on VAX that would make it easier to port it to RSX? Or can Datatrieve be accessed over DECnet so the scraper code runs on VAX and populates Datatrieve on RSX? I honestly don't know what I think on that subject. Or, actually, I do. I think it would be even better to just have key-value pairs. Why overcomplicate things? Any unknown key is just ignored. We could expand with new keys without having the code synced. And then the values can hold any character except newline. Actually I am thinking that I wouldn't mind writing the program myself, but don't wait for me, I have a host of other things I want to do as well. I'm always open to writing anything. :) Knock one out for RSX? :-) I'll try and get back with some more thoughts about file formats and whatnot in a while. My pizza just arrived... Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol