Re: [9fans] don't shoot me

[ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Scott Schwartz wrote:

> | I like XML as an information exchange language for diverse platforms.
> | Being as vast as it is, it no doubt will be abused more often than
> | properly employed.  But I am not aware of any preferable alternative
> | (ASN.1?).
>
> S-expressions.
>

yep. see: http://www.acl.lanl.gov/supermon/ for our monitoring tools that
are all SEXP based, and have a self-describing data format. The data
streams are composable, since they are S-expressions, so combining data
from 1024 streams to one stream is pretty easy. They include a kernel
monitor that produces Linux /proc type information in S-expression format,
with the difference that our module accomodates lots more data and lots
more information than Linux provides normally.

For a small, fast, embeddable library that we wrote here
see:http://sexpr.sourceforge.net/. This has found non-Supermon uses all
over the place, including in a telescope somewhere. There is also a "Why
not XML" section on that page.

In the limit, and I know this sounds nuts, I kind of wish everything in
/proc (and /dev/*/whatever) produced SEXP. While Plan 9 is nowhere near as
inconsistent as Linux in the /proc area, the structure is still pretty
inconsistent. Some things are lists, others are ordered pairs, and others
are tables. If it were all SEXP it could be self-describing and uniformly
parseable with the small, fast library. But maybe I am nuts.

ron
p.s. Betcha this mail gets filtered due to the SEXP content. But that's
what they're called by old-time lisp dudes.

p.p.s. OH well, I'll quote Matt:

"Why not XML?
The goal of any project should be to solve a problem in an elegant, well
designed manner. Buzzword compliance rarely achieves this, other than
allowing a lowly programmer or software engineer to appease higher-ups who
read that "XML is the latest great thing!" XML suffers from certain flaws
that make it worthless in an environment where speed and efficiency
(memory and time complexity) are key requirements. Compare the
performance, footprint, and developer complexity of Xerces and this
s-expression library, and you'll see that for hierarchical data
representation, one is significantly simpler than the other without losing
the ability to do its job (represent data!). After working with XML for a
while (~3-4 years) on multiple projects, I find that since starting to use
s-expressions again as a data format has allowed me to spend less time
debugging my data representation code and more time on problems that
matter. XML sucks, enough said."