[Info-vax] Portable OpenVMS binary data format?

[John E]

> 
> > The nicest example I can think of is that stats packages like SAS & 
> > stata have data formats that are binary and portable and what's great 
> > is not the efficiency of storage and transfer but the fact that the 
> > whole thing is seamless b/c it preserves all the metadata along the way 
> > so you never worry about specifying any data formats.
> 
> A fondness for premature optimizations, maybe?

Stephen,

I don't follow the "premature optimization" criticism at all here.  If you have SAS or Stata on multiple platforms the fact that you can just FTP binary data (including metadata) across the platforms and read/write with no additional effort is very handy.

E.g. you can process and whittle down a large Stata dataset on a huge linux machine with tons of disk & memory, then download the smaller dataset to you laptop for continued work.  Super convenient and something that is pretty common nowadays with many cross platform apps.  Not too relevant here as Stata is not on VMS at all and the SAS version on VMS is really old (I think even more out of date than Fortran on VMS).

The CDF format you mention is a good example of this sort of thing along with HDF.  As noted these tend to be oriented to newer unix fortran versions and I've never spent the time to try and get them working on VMS.  (ASCII has so far been the easier path)