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From: Ernie Wright <>
Subject: Re: Beyond GEDCOM
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:00:22 -0400
References: <slrnf9ol6e.cvf.usenet@goodwill.larseighner.com><BCdni.12912$LH5.7360@trnddc02>
In-Reply-To: <BCdni.12912$LH5.7360@trnddc02>
Wes Groleau wrote:
> And why this devout slavery to the four-character abbreviation?
Most likely they were following the fashion for personal computer
metadata formats at the time the standard was formalized. A number of
(mostly binary) formats developed in the mid-80s use 4-character tags.
A surviving example is RIFF, the metadata format used to store Windows
AVIs.
The idea was that you can treat 4 (or fewer) ASCII characters as a
single 32-bit integer, making lookups and comparisons substantially
faster and simpler than they would be for tags of arbitrary length.
This actually mattered on early PCs, which were thousands of times
slower than they are now.
- Ernie http://home.comcast.net/~erniew
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