On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 21:33 -0300, Klaus Heinrich Kiwi wrote:
I think that if we take this discussion to extremes, we'd be talking
about a 'self-descriptive meta language' so that upgrades to
userspace/kernel are well covered (can you say "xml"?)
HAHAHA, kernel output xml? dream on :) I'm willing to do wholesale
output changes, but something that heavy in kernel is impossible to
push. I can just see Al cussing up a storm as he read that.
Just to be clear no one is suggesting XML or anything heavy weight.
Rather what is being suggested are trivial changes. For example string
values are always enclosed in double quotes with interior characters
properly escaped, or that non-decimal integer values include a radix
prefix. I think one could simply summarize this as saying the lexical
structure of value tokens match the lexical structure of the C
programming language tokens which is pretty simple but unambiguous
(plus there is a wealth of code to generate and parse these simple
ubiquitous tokens).