On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 5:28 AM, Göran Krampe <goran at 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