In article <Pine.NEB.3.96.971005202116.13467T-100000@cynic.portal.ca>,
	Curt Sampson <cjs@portal.ca> writes:
> Is it mandated by POSIX that these datafiles be binary?

When I designed the file format I chose a binary format because I didn't
want all programs to spend lots of CPU cycles with parsing ctype data
files on startup.

> I hate sticking stuff that is endian-specific in /usr/share.

They files are always big endian and the I/O functions are aware of that.

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                http://home.owl.de/~tron/