Brad Pepers wrote:

> I know some of the
> argument involved but I compare them to the benefits of a human readable
> stream for debugging and lack of worrying about endian-ness and other
> issues and I often opt for text instead of binary in my own protocol
> designs.

SNIP

> So what are the fundamental problems with using a text stream? Is it
> just hide-bound belief in binary streams or are there solid valid
> arguments to be made?

Well, compare number of cases when you need pure raw efficiency and
speed with number of cases when you need to peep into message and you
don't have message viewer at your disposal but just a text editor. I
guess that efficiency would win hands down.

Best regards
Pavel Cisar