The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[Grant Griffin]

Tamer Fahmy wrote:
> 
> Thomas Wouters wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 10:30:58PM +0100, Grant Griffin wrote:
> >
> > > BTW, why to you Unix people separate your packager gizmo from your
> > > compression gizmo?  Very strange...
> >
> > Strange ? Really ? I find it strange you would want to put different
> > functionality into one program... Packing and compressing are two different
> > things, so why force one program to do both ? :)
> >
> > So much better to seperate the functionality: If you get a new version of
> > the compress utility, or a new compress utility that does it so much better,
> > you wont have to change anything in the packing utility. And the other way
> > 'round. And decent packaging utilities provide support to magically include
> > compression, by calling the appropriate compress utility itself... GNU tar
> > has support for standard unix compress (.Z), gnu zip (.gz) and bzip2 (.bz2)
> > this way, and you can tell it to start any program you wish, with the
> > '--use-compress=' option.
> >
> > Just like there isn't a Wordperfect or Word-alike program on (traditional)
> > UNIX; no all-encompassing Word-processor. Instead, you edit using your own
> > favorite editor, passing it through your own favorite text formatter, to
> > translate it to a file format of your choosing. And just like Mosaic, long
> > ago, didn't provide support for all protocols itself, but rather let other
> > programs take care of them... You can see a lot has changed in the UNIX
> > world, in this regard :-)
> 
> Not only that. Because it seperates them - it compresses them much better.
> Why?
> Because the tar utility packages all the files in to a single file and runs
> the desired compression algorithm over it instead of just zipping every
> single file and putting it compressed into the archive...

But there is a very real cost here.  You have to decompress the whole
thing to extract a single component.  The compression saving gained by
the tar approach is negligible in the scale of the capabilities of
modern computers. 

> 
> Never-be-rude-to-an-arab-and-especially-not-to-a-Linux-user'ly y'rs,
>   Tamer.

also,-don't-be-rude-to-any-of-those-other-people-in-the-song--or
  even-us-windows-users-<wink>-ly y'rs,

=g2
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
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