On 4/24/12, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@beta9.be> wrote:
On 24 Apr 2012, at 11:10, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
And yet again I point to Tirade :)
http://goran.krampe.se/blog/Squeak/Tirade.rdoc http://goran.krampe.se/blog/Squeak/Tirade2.rdoc http://goran.krampe.se/blog/Squeak/Tirade3.rdoc
Especially Tirade2 above shows a bit about size (4 classes, 500 loc) speed and portability. Tirade is basically a parser for Smalltalk messages that only are allowed to use literals as arguments (although arbitrarily nested literals).
Which is exactly what Stef describes + a bit more. :)
Yeah, I remember reading that a long time ago. It is indeed a cool idea, Göran. Reminds me of the Erlang related UBF (http://www.sics.se/~joe/ubf/site/home.html).
I think the JSON choise is not bad: it is simple and universally accepted.
But you can express **EXACTLY** the same with #(
)
So what is the point?
Stef
Yes, you are right, they are technically mostly equivalent. (JSON has simpler primitive types, clear escapes, lists/arrays and maps/dictionaries).
But the point is, there are so many formats out there, and everybody likes to make there own.
If you pick JSON, the discussion ends. It is an RFC standard.
+1
If you pick something that looks suspiciously like some (for most people) weird programming language you will get discussions, always.
Dale said so: it is a pragmatic choice.
+1
Now, given the fact that the domain here is Smalltalk anyway, there is something to say for using a Smalltalk based representation.
But then you need to write a clear spec and a non-compiler based parser.
With the JSON meta data, you could envision other non-Smalltalk tools using it more easily.
+1
Sven
-- Sven Van Caekenberghe http://stfx.eu Smalltalk is the Red Pill