On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 5:28 AM, Göran Krampe goran@krampe.se wrote:
- Human readable, just like a cs. We just gzip them and make up some nice
extension like .dz or something. :)
- Editable in a text editor. This means it can not be too complex.
- Easy to extend. This means the base syntax should leave room for new
elements and "relaxed parsing" that can ignore unknown elements
- Very easy to parse. This means it needs to be simple, simple, simple. I
don't want to depend on YAXO or similarly large package for parsing.
- Not "compiler driven". I want the format to be safe and fast to load. This
means the regular Smalltalk Compiler is out of the picture.
I don't understand the combination of "human readable" and "not compiler driven". Does this mean that you are going to include bytecodes as well as source code? If the file is editable in a text editor, then it will be easy to make the bytecodes be incompatible with the source code.
Maybe your definition of "human readable" and "editable in a text editor" are different from mine. Perhaps you only intend human readability as a last resort, as a way of debugging the system, for example. Netstrings aren't very editable, because you have to keep counting characters every time you change a line. But if editability is only for extreme emergencies, this is OK.
-Ralph Johnson