Subj : structure templates
To   : borland.public.cpp.borlandcpp
From : "Rob C. " <robb_christiansen@juno.com>
Date : Tue Nov 04 2003 10:20 am

Say someone were to come to me and ask me to write a program that would read his binary file full of data. But he didn’t have the structure template. Now, I’ve always thought of a structure template as the file’s basic building blocks . . . the file’s DNA, if you will. (Certainly as important as DNA), or the file’s “blueprint”. That people can’t read a binary file (like they can ASCII) without a computer program to translate it for 
them, and a computer program can’t read a binary file without a 
structure template to instruct it to how to read the gibberish 
and store the various variables and data types. [Or am I wrong 
in this assumption?] So my question is this, is there some way I 
could reconstruct this guy's file’s structure template so that I 
could then read/write to it.

.