On 07/29/2013 07:44 PM, David Gibson wrote: ... > So, by way of investigation, let me propose an alternative > expression of schemas, that I'm also not convinced we should do, > but is possible and expressive. It's illustrative, because it's > kind of the polar opposite approach to XSD: just use C.
That actually sounds reasonable. But, I think there's a difference between a schema, which defines what's legal in an abstract fashion, and a validator, which defines that the data conforms to the schema. I can see that codding a validator in C would be pretty easy, and even potentially quite simple/clean given a suitable set of library functions as you say. However, I'm not so convinced that expressing the schema itself as C would work out so well. I think the code/data-structures would end up being pretty stylized so they could actually be read as a schema. At that point, a specific schema language would probably be simpler? Of course, this is all somewhat conjecture; perhaps the only way to tell would be to prototype various ideas and see how well they work. Equally, I'm not sure I want to bind the schema definition to a particular language. I'd like to be able to programatically generate or manipulate *.dts files in arbitrary languages. Integrating a C interpreter into those languages in order to handle the schema would be annoying, whereas directly handling a special-purpose schema language seems like it'd be more tangible. As an aside, in the past I toyed with the idea of using Python data structures as a *.dts syntax, and hence allowing macros/auto-generation using custom Python code, and I'm sure Forth will come up sometime in this thread:-) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
