Umm... LISP is all about using strings instead of binary representations,
or at least hiding binary representations other than list building
primitives from the programmer.
Your ASCII partition table proposal is _exactly_ what a LISPer would
propose for partition tables: use strings to represent values in a format
that has no implicit size limits on numbers, is endian independent, etc.
The only difference is a LISPer would surround it with parentheses :-).
IMHO s-expressions are severely underrepresented as an
architecture-independent data representation that could more or less
eliminate the need for ad hoc parsers in, say, /proc. Of course
one-ASCII-symbol-per-file accomplishes more or less the same thing,
but for much higher system call overhead. I guess the ideal would be a
multi-file-spanning variation on seq_file (I think that's the name for
the stateful /proc parsing helper?) that would serialize the contents
of a tree into an s-expression, allowing the best of both worlds.
miket
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