Re: [lmi] actuarial tables format (was Re: Terse list of valuable projects)

[Václav Slavík]

Hi,

On 24 Mar 2012, at 10:32, Greg Chicares wrote:
> Occasionally we have a table that's amenable to run-length encoding:
>  ages 0-4  value 0.01
>  ages 5-9  value 0.02
>  ...
> but I prefer to force each consecutive value to be specified, trading
> space for uniformity, simplicity, and robustness in the table-lookup
> code.

Let me offer two observations about this:

(1) Use the <row age="n"> syntax, supporting this case is trivial as far as the 
format is concerned: <row min-age="5" max-age="9">.

(2) We shouldn't use this XML format for in-memory representation of the 
tables, that would be wasteful in both time and space. Instead, we should parse 
the file once and store the data in another data structure that is optimized 
for lookup. Consequently, the ease of table lookup doesn't matter for the XML 
file format. So if this would be useful enough to have, it's really no trouble 
to implement it.

Regards,
Vaclav