Compiler: Size of generated executable file

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Roman Ivanov" <isroman-rem at move.km.ru> wrote in message 
news:hilovb$ioc$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Most lines in a typical config are of the form
>
> some-key=some-vaue
>
> If the value is ASCII text, like a file path, there simply isn't anything 
> you could save by converting it to binary. If the value is a number, you 
> would get some savings, but they would be negligible for anything but very 
> large numbers. ( ceil(log_base_10(N)) - ceil(log_base_2(N))? Something of 
> that sort.) You could get large savings on booleans, but you would have to 
> be tricky, because memory still works in bytes.
>

Good points. Although with binary, the key wouldn't necissarily need to be 
text. But yea, I'm probably just splitting hairs now.

> Storing configs in zip files would increase boot and load times, because 
> applications would waste cycles on unzipping them. That is bloat of a 
> worse kind.

I'm not sure that would be the case if the data was stored on a hard drive 
(as opposed to one of those flash drives), because wouldn't the cost of 
extra disk access typically be greater than decoding a non-top-of-the-line 
zip encoding? (Not that I really care all that much either way.)