On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Dan Argent wrote:
>If they're so easy to hack, why have em?
>the normal ones work fine
Summary of entire discussion you can find in mailing list archives:
A) Binary pfiles are just as easy to hack when someone is in the account.
(think 'mudpasswd')
B) ASCII pfiles don't waste space (and may even save it) because they do
not have to allocate a fixed space for strings.
C) You don't have to wipe pfiles with ASCII ones.
D) Binary pfiles are more simple to read/write.
E) It is much easier to change values in an ASCII pfile, especially handy
when a particular character crashes your MUD when they unrent.
F) ASCII objfiles would allow easy 'string' objects.
G) ASCII pfiles are not munged by changing platforms.
H) Binary pfiles take up less space on machines with large cluster sizes,
which includes Windows/FAT (32k worst case), but doesn't include Linux
where it has 4k sizes at worst (and typically gobs of free inodes).
Think that's most of them...probably missed a few.
--
George Greer - Me@Null.net | Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity
http://www.van.ml.org/~greerga | is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Hubbard
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