On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 08:19:39PM +0100, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Sunday 04 November 2001 19:59, you wrote:
> > The idea is that if the userland application does it's parsing wrong, it
> > should either not compile at all, or abort loudly at run-time, instead of
> > getting bad values "sometimes".
>
> All the XML parser interfaces that I have seen so far allow you to do things
> that will cause the code to fail when you do stupid things or are not
> prepared that there may appear unknown elements. Or you use a DTD, and then
> your code is guaranteed to fail after a change, which may be even worse.
XML is pretty far from light-weight. And it's only human readable in theory.
I like the *idea*, but XML is the wrong implementation of that idea. Other than
that I think we could agree ;)
>
> One-value-files are a noticable exception, you must be VERY stupid if your
> code breaks because of an additional file.
hehe, agreed. The problem then is type information.
Consider:
-------------
int mf = open("/proc/meminfo/totalmem",O_RDONLY);
int32 mem;
read(mf, &mem, sizeof(mem));
-------------
Does this work ? Yes of course. But what if I ported my program to
a 64 bit arch... The program still compiles. It also runs. But the
values are no longer correct. Now *that* is hell.
Same story with ASCII.
I want type information.
-- ................................................................ : jakob@unthought.net : And I see the elder races, : :.........................: putrid forms of man : : Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, : : OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. : :.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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