Hi Folks,
In his book Software Tools Brian Kernighan says, “A program should be viewed as just a stage in a larger process. Stages should be simple and easy to connect. Keep data in a standard internal form for text for other programs.” That last part – keep data in a standard form – is particularly interesting.
I am working on a project to map (translate) military air navigation data to a civilian air nav form. What is the standard form? Is the military form – tab-delimited text files (a.k.a., UNIX form) – the standard form? Or is the civilian form – XML – the standard form? Should the military form be maintained as long as possible, processing the data using UNIX tools, and only at the final step is the data converted to XML? Or should the military data be immediately converted to XML and thenceforth use XML tools to process the data, ultimately arriving at the desired XML instance? As an XML person, I took the latter path, but now that I’ve learned a bit about UNIX, I question if that was the best choice.
Thoughts?
/Roger
