Question on .rev file format

Steve Gehlbach steve at nexpath.com
Tue Jul 29 18:26:01 EDT 2003


Thanks to all who replied, your comments are very useful.

I guess I am not completely convinced that the pluses outweigh the 
minuses regarding the Revolution binary format, but I will try to keep 
an open mind.

Some other reasons for text formats:

- managing groups of engineers:  you can look at the nightly checkins to 
CVS and see how many lines of code have changed.  Also can more easily 
find when and by whom a bug was injected and how to fix it.

- CVS puts a version code in the text based on triggers like $Id$ etc, 
which is very useful when managing various releases and finding which 
version of code you have.  This would of course corrupt a .rev file.  I 
have managed to get around this for many other tools (CAD programs, 
document programs) since most have an optional text mode, such as .rtf 
in Word.  But they also frequently have bugs so the binary format is 
Truth, and the text mode is only close to the same.  .rtf is pretty 
good, though.  Revolution needs a pure text mode option, but only if it 
really works.

Since the .rev file is 95% the Transcript code in pure text form, I am 
not convinced of the speed of loading issue.  One eye blink or two? 
Were it tokenized, as Basic did once long ago, I might be more convinced.

In general, binary source code formats are the bane of the Linux world.

-Steve








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