Re: Cooperating on .defs API specifications

[Ross McFarland <rwmcfa1 neces com>]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 17:08, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 23:40, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
> > > That thread mentioned switching to a more detailed XML format for
> > > the defs.  I think that's A Good Idea; binding code generation would
> > > simply be an exercise in XSLT.  :-)
> > >
> > You can express everything you can express as XML in
> > S-Expressions. Especially for Scheme wrappers, those are more
> > convinient than XML ;-)
> 
> I'd be fairly happy about using XML for gtkmm in future even though it
> would mean some work, because I could then remove some of the horrible
> regular expressions from our parser, and use an XML parser instead.

and as was mentioned before, there's an XML parser for just about ever
language out there. being able to extend the defs files (new meta data)
without breaking backwards compatibility would be a must. with well
defined formats having mature parsers (like XML) this won't be an issue.
if projects have to code up their own def file parser it would be both
needless work and much less robust. 

-rm