[fpc-pascal] Re: SDFDataset users!?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012, Reinier Olislagers wrote:

> On 24-9-2012 17:22, michael.vancanneyt-0Is9KJ9Sb0A at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> On Mon, 24 Sep 2012, Reinier Olislagers wrote:
>>> 2. Presumably sdfdataset is used to exchange data with Delphi systems
>>> using tstrings.delimitedtext. Therefore I'm stressing Delphi
>>> compatibility in my tests. Do you think this is justified?
>>
>> No, definitely not. The two are totally unrelated.
> I'm very confused here. To say the least.
>
> So remarks like these from sdfdataset:
> 14/Ago/01  Version 2.00 (Orlando Arrocha)
>      Delimiter property added to TSdfDataSet. No more dependency on
> CommaText
>         methodology -- choose your own delimiter.
>
> means sdfdataset just happened to use commatext but the format does not
> need to be sdf?

Define SDF ?

> (SDF => see
> http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.Classes.TStrings.CommaText)

That is not a usable definition.

>
> And the name sdfdataset does not mean the dataset actually needs to use
> sdf format data?

That depends on how you define SDF data.
There are 76 definitions of SDF. Several of which are a data format.

The one I know is a fixed-length format (Standard Data Format), so totally 
different from what Borland/Embarcadero/whatever knows.

> Finally, I'll post on the forum that sdf compatibility is not one of the
> goals of sdfdataset.
>
> Is there some defined on-disk format that sdfdataset should be following?

As I understood it, it is either fixed length or CSV. 
CSV as in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180


Michael.