Re: Textual transmission typically faster?

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

A decently designed binary data encoding protocol will
take less space to encode and transmit, and less time
to decode, than a decently designed text based one.

Just think:  writing an integer as four bytes takes
one instruction, maybe two if byteswapping is needed.
But writing "32768" takes more bytes, and more time
to encode/decode.  Text compression costs even more.
There is no way to recover those differences.


Of course those "decently designed" binary protocols
rely on things like contextualized encodings.  If you
demand self-descriptive data, then it's easy to get to
the point where manipulating type data costs so much
that encoding/decoding differences are in the noise.

And some programming environments basically don't
support binary data worth speaking of.  So there are
going to be tradeoffs to consider.

- Dave