Around 7 o'clock on Jan 22, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> Writing a parser for a well-designed language is a trivial exercice,
> whether you use yacc/lex or write it by hand (as Real Men do). I
> don't think that giving up the elegance of a human-readable language
> for the perceived convenience of being able to use off-the-shelf tools
> is a sane trade-off.
The language may well be human readable, which is certainly a feature,
however, it suffers from two significant problems:
1) Human readable does not immediately translate into human writable.
In particular, one must learn the syntax of the language before
one can modify the file. Using an existing syntax eliminates this
step.
2) Programmatic modification of the file is difficult, and often
loses most of the formatting and comments. Given that we expect
to expose this interface to people not using it on a daily basis,
we should anticipate that most configuration will be done with
tools other than a simple text editor.
I'm willing to make things slightly harder for the expert user to permit
less familiar users to take advantage of the functionality through
external configuration tools.
External configuration is already a problem; KDE 3 includes sophisticated
Xft configuration mechanisms and has done so by incorporating large parts
of the Xft source code into their library. I can't easily extend the
capabilities of my library without significantly impacting their tool.
I think a well designed XML DTD will be nearly as easy to use as the
existing Xft configuration language; certainly the semantics are the same,
only the syntax has changed.
Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab
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