[LINK] E-mail viruses blamed as spam rises sharply

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 10:48:19AM +1100, Alastair Rankine wrote:
> On Feb 23, 2004, at 10:26 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> >it seemed to me that his point was that XML is unneccessarily hard-to-parse
> >compared to a simple list.  when all that is needed for a particular
> >application is a simple list, then don't complicate it with fancy
> >configuration formats.
> 
> Certainly agree, if you can 100% guarantee that the list format will suffice
> for all possible (likely) evolutionary pathways of the format.  For example,
> mandating (as you do below) 7-bit ascii these days prettymuch precludes any
> human-readable text, unless we want to restrict it to US English only (a
> luxury we really can't afford these days).

i don't know much about iSCSI but my assumption was that the simple text lists
were for device naming/device numbering purposes.  for tasks like that 7-bit
ASCII is sufficient....there's no need for a format which can support
multi-lingual word-processor.

> >the more complex the code, the slower it runs and the more likely it is that
> >there will be bugs.
> 
> Disagree with complex == slow. Simple counterexample: binary vs. linear
> search.

parsing text is one task that can't be made noticably faster with clever
algorithms (the clever algorithms were discovered 30+ years ago and are
standard practice)....all you can do is complicate it and add unneccessary
features, both of which end up making it slower.

craig