Re: analysis of YANG vs. RELAX NG

[Martin Bjorklund <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I really appreciate your comments on the YANG draft.  If there are
other little rules you have found, please let us know.

"Rohan Mahy" <[e-mail]> wrote:
> For example the distinction between the leaf-list and list objects
> in YANG is pretty syntactic. (One of the YANG team's
> "little-rules").

I can understand if you argue that leaf-list is not necessary, since
we have list.  But why is having leaf-list a little-rule?

We think leaf-list is useful of course, but that's not the point (I
think).

> Likewise, creating containers automatically is a syntactic construction.
> (Another "little-rule", but at least this one is explicit).

I think that this is something we can fix.  I think the problem lies
more in the current description of the concept (of containers used for
structuring purpose), than in the concept itself.  The underlying idea
is that if a container is used for structural purposes only, then it
doesn't have to be present in the XML encoding unless necessary.
I.e. if it currently doesn't have any children, then it doesn't have
to be encoded.

> Defining new data types in YANG is completely gratuitous syntax.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what this means. Could you explain what
you mean?


/martin