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> On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 22:43, Hunsberger, Peter wrote:
> I can't get my head round opening any electronic archive in 100 years Michael
It doesn't have to be dead for that while- I'm working at the moment on grid enabling code that was written in the late 60's, and has been touched a couple of times a decade since. It's unlikely that the data (or even the out-of-band metadata, as I've extracted half of the information for the interface from the stuctured text source of the user handbook, and half from the FORTRAN code itself) will stop being useful unless the rules of physics change enough that the approximations in the models don't hold. The interfacing data is now being put into XML, so I can operate on it easily (ie have it in a human recognisable form, but use it to generate WSDL and the source for wrapper classes), but there would be little gain in doing so without the presence of XML tools and an XML saturated environment.
But structured plain text definitely works over the 40 or so year lifespans of the code I sometimes work with.
Pete
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