My objection has nothing to do with string vs. byte. Messages used in wire protocols exist on a continuum between fixed width and variable width. The happy medium there, which almost all protocols follow is a fixed width header that also provides the bye count of the following variable width body. The nrepl protocol appears to have aimed at that, but missed.
Fixed width messages have the advantage of being extractable from the byte stream without having to do any parsing, while with a variable width message format you must parse and extract messages from the stream in the same step. After trying to write a nrepl client it is fairly obvious to me that in the creation of the protocol similar protocols were examined and because they were prefixed by numbers, the nrepl messages were, without a clear understanding of why and what the purpose of the number is. As implemented the number may as well be replaced with some kind of START and END tag. On Sunday, March 20, 2011, Stuart Sierra <the.stuart.sie...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, as a heavy Emacs/SLIME user who does not work with Common Lisp any more, > I'd rather have a Clojure-specific Emacs environment, especially something > that can do more introspection of the JVM, e.g., look up JavaDocs and examine > classes through reflection. > In my not-terribly-well-informed opinion, string-oriented protocols are > easier to parse in string-oriented languages like Perl and Emacs Lisp, > whereas byte-oriented protocols help avoid mixups with character encoding and > line-endings. Pick your poison. > -Stuart Sierraclojure.com > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your > first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -- And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
