I personally think string parsers are *much* better than the alternatives
(which basically boil down to nasty binary interfaces)
That's *MUCH* worse.
Strings are nice. They aren't that complex, and as long as it's not a
performance-critical area, there are basically no downsides.
Binary structures and ioctl's are *much* worse. They are totally
undebuggable with generic tools (think "echo" or "strace"), and they are a
total nightmare to parse across architectures and pointer sizes.
So the rule should be: always use strings if at all possible and relevant.
If the data is fundamentally binary, it shouldn't be re-coded to ascii (no
real advantage), but if the data is "stringish", and there aren't big
performance issues, then keep it as strings.
Linus
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