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Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... [message #43142 is a reply to message #43004]

Mon, 14 March 2005 14:15

Michael Wallace
Messages: 409
Registered: December 2003

Senior Member

> The reason I thought this would be better as a text default is that you can
> easily go from string -> number, but you can't go backwards. Considering
> the input is text, why would they just assume it is filled with floating
> point numbers? It appears to be completely arbitrary... A string format
> appears to be the most "generalized" form you could use.

The reason you assume that it's filled with numbers is because it most
likely is. (Don't you just love circular logic? ;-) ) IDL is built
around *data* manipulation. We use text files all the time in my
industry and aside from the header, if present, the contents are all
numbers. Some of the numbers are integers and some are floating point.
Obviously, a floating point type covers both cases. Text files have
the nice advantage in that you can look at the contents of the file
without needing to load the files into any program. Just because we
happen to store data within a text file doesn't mean that it should be
interpreted as text.

I'm not just talking about one particular project here, but we create
ASCII representations of a lot of our data on many of our projects.
Sure, it's not the primary form we store the data in for the long term,
but it's great for our scientists ad hoc work, especially since our
scientists seem to be allergic to netCDF, CDF, HDF and the like.

Another issue is that it'd be terrible performance-wise to read in a
bunch of values only to convert them to numeric types. And most of the
time, your CSV or other files will be numeric in nature. Having strings
in there is a special case. Maybe the change should be to make
templates easier to modify rather than change the fundamental nature of
read_ascii(). I just don't buy the explanation that the majority of
folks will have ASCII files of text rather than ASCII files of numbers.
You can try to convince me otherwise, but I don't know that you'll get
very far. ;-)

I feel pretty dirty now that I'm actually defending something in the
language rather than railing against something in the language, which is
my typical. ;-)

-Mike

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[Message index]

		Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: Jonathan Greenberg on Mon, 14 March 2005 09:56
		Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: Karsten Rodenacker on Tue, 15 March 2005 01:04
		Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: Michael Wallace on Mon, 14 March 2005 14:15
		Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: JD Smith on Fri, 18 March 2005 15:11
		Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: Jonathan Greenberg on Mon, 14 March 2005 13:34
		Re: Forcing READ_ASCII output to be a set of strings... By: Michael Wallace on Mon, 14 March 2005 12:56

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