[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 5:12:58 PM UTC+13, Dave Froble wrote:
> Frankly, (and yes, I'm biased), I find records reasonable, and a stream 
> of bytes baffling and confusing. Guess it's what one is used to.

Trouble is, there are many binary file formats that do not map easily to a simple sequence of records (of whatever delimitation). Consider the IFF family of file formats, for example: these are built out of chunks, and certain chunk types can contain other chunks.

For another example, consider file formats like TIFF and TTF, where there is a directory that identifies the location and size of the various major pieces. Oh, and PDF comes under this as well.

And then there are text-based format families, like XML, JSON, YAML, TOML ...