Re: ASM Patch 3 nearing completion; hdf5 question

[pauljohn]

"Marcus G. Daniels" wrote:
> 
> PJ> I personally prefer to save data in raw ASCII format, for reasons of
> PJ> portability and permanence of access.
> 
> ASCII doesn't mean data is portable.  
I don't mean portable in the serialization of new object. I mean 
1. "eligible for use" by people who are not computer geniuses.  Since
most of the people in this category use programs such as SAS, SPSS,
Stata, or Limdep, (not R), they can't do anything with an hdf5 file. As
Kernighan and Pike say in The Practice of Programming (1990) "Textual
data moves readily from one system to another and is the simplest
portable way to exchange arbitray information between systems."
2. "Portable over time." If I write text files on a cd today, I expect
i'll be able to read them in 2 years.  

Some relatively easy things to do with the ascii output, such as "get
last line from output for each run and collect into a single file" are
quite difficult for me to imagine with many hdf5 datasets.  But it is 
probably the case that I'm just not writing out the hdf5 data in the
appropriate way.


-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700


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