Programming Praxis

We have today our second essay: Text File Databases. An essay isn’t an exercise; it doesn’t present a task for you to perform, but instead provides extended discussion and complete source code. Though essays may be based on exercises, the idea is that an essay can delve more deeply into a topic than is possible in the limited space and time of an exercise.

Today’s essay provides a library that makes it convenient to read, write, transform and summarize files of data in ascii-text format. An astonishing amount of data is available in such formats, and doubtless a large percentage of computing power is expended in processing such files, so it makes sense to have a powerful library of easy-to-use functions for handling those files. I have personally been using some-or-another variant of this library for at least a dozen years, and can’t imagine how much time it has saved me in all those years.

Please read the essay, and feel free to comment on it below; comments on the essay itself are closed. Let me know if you see any errors. And feel free to link to the essay on the internet if you know of places where it is appropriate.