Introduction to the Art of Programming Using Scala

Chapter 33

Direct Access Binary Files

Back in chapter 9 we learned about basic text files. These had the advantage of being simple. They were reasonably easy to program and the files themselves could be edited with a standard text editor. Unfortunately, they did not have any inherent meaning and they were very brittle to edit. Small mistakes could easily invalidate the whole file. These problems were corrected by using XML starting with chapter 14. Both flat text and XML have the downfall that they are slow and bloated in size. In these areas, XML is worse than flat text. To fix those problems we need to move in the opposite direction and go to binary files. Unfortunately, this move takes away the advantage that text and XML have that they can ...