John Halleck wrote:
> The oder is always significant. Period.
>
> If you want to say that an output file can have some specific CaveXML
> sections reordered, fine. But that's much different than saying that
> that the order in the file is not significant.
Was that odor or order?
Order really depends on the object being modelled. Order in text/word
documents matter, order in descriptions of circuit netlists don't. I
tend to believe cave survey data falls in to the later type. Certainly,
a cave with two entrances can declare the first shot from either entrace
the "first" shot and still produce the same "view" of the cave.
> If you reorder shots, I can no longer reconstruct the original data
> order from them. Which is part of the reason that I'd prefer to
> have each pass thorugh the file of anything I write just add things,
> or change things it has written itself.
Well actually, that really depends on what information is attached to
the shots. This is really a database, as in SQL, sort of thing. The
proper query will reproduce the original data organization, while
another query will produce another relationship in the data.
Regarding only adding and only modifying those items added by the
application, that over time leads to inconsistant data with exteranous
elements. That is why we have heap managers, data compaction, etc. In
real life, that is why we de-frag our hard disks and rebuild our
operating systems. Just have backups of your data handy ;-)
Garry Petrie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Apr 02 2001 - 18:00:00 CEST