Re: [Caml-list] Re: Serialisation of PXP DTDs

[Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@upsilon.cc>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 08:34:21AM -0700, Dario Teixeira wrote:
> - ease of use
> - "future-proofness"
> - portability
> - human-readability
> 
> Sexplib scores very good on ease of use, future-proofness, and
                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Does it?

I mean, as long as types are as simples are pairs we will probably
write down the very same S-expression, but for more complex types you
hand up having to choose how to encode them in S-expressions. Such
design choices can need to be changed in the future as more types will
be supported.  I fail to see why the future-proofness of such choices
should be better than that of bin-prot.

Yes, in case of changes you can imagine writing converters from the
old format to the new one, but you can do that also for binary
representations. In fact, doing that in OCaml using bitmatch would
lead to the same code as per S-expressions, I believe.

Beside this comment,
thanks for the nice analysis.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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