Re: Something to parse into...

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>]

>This is a proposal to add some dynamicly typed data structures to
>Apache 2.0.   
[...]
>Do we want something like this?

I am not a big believer in replacing entire type systems with dynamic
equivalents.  I am even less of a fan of Lisp constructs.  I think a
good set of abstract data types that match what we intend to parse,
with an internal representation that is efficient for C, would be
a better design.  That still means defining things like lists and
queues, but not reinventing Java or C++.

Just my opinion.

....Roy

Re: Something to parse into...

[Ben Hyde <bh...@pobox.com>]

Roy T. Fielding writes:
>>This is a proposal to add some dynamicly typed data structures to
>>Apache 2.0.   
>[...]
>>Do we want something like this?
>
>I am not a big believer in replacing entire type systems with dynamic
>equivalents.  

Nor i in this kind of system.  There is a kind of imperialism about
dynamic typing that spreads thru systems :-).

> I am even less of a fan of Lisp constructs.
> ...  but not reinventing Java or C++.

and then there is XML.

There is a lot of craft knowledge in these three communities
that it is helpful to leverage.  It is difficult to firewall
out all the design patterns in these three communities.

I'm not adding a garbage collector, nor an interpreter.

> I think a
>good set of abstract data types that match what we intend to parse,
>with an internal representation that is efficient for C, would be
>a better design.  That still means defining things like lists and
>queues, ...

That was my intent, except I non-parsing uses I'd like to address
(request pattern matching for example).

To me it would seem the harder problems are
   (a) where it gets used,
   (b) how the perimeter is handled, and
   (c) what's it's relationship to XML?
Of those I only tried to address (b) in the proposal.

>Just my opinion.

It would be good for other people to opine where they want
the chips to fall.

>....Roy