Re: [Json] Schema Requirements (Was: Re: Nudging the English-language vs. formalisms discussion forward)

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Pete Cordell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message From: "Nico Williams"
>> This sounds to me like an argument about how to handle extensibility.
>> We should first consider whether we want schema extensibility and if
>> we do, whether we want it to be explicit (like the ... extensibility
>> marker in ASN.1) or implicit (like implicit ... ASN.1 extensibility
>> markers in every type).
>
> I assume you're taling about extensibility of the vocabularies defined by a
> schema rather than extensibility of the schema language itself?

Yes.  See ASN.1's extensibility marker.

Briefly, if you end a structure/set/choice type with '...' then
decoders are supposed to not fail just because unknown fields are
included in the input; the decoders.  (There's more to it, but I'm
simplifying.)

>> My position: we should want extensibility, and it should be explicit
>> (because having every type be implicitly extensible is a PITA for code
>> generation).
>
> What aspect do you find a PITA?  Supporting both implicit extensibility and
> explicit extensibility is surely harder than just supporting implicit
> extensibility?

Let's say you're generating C structs from the schema, and a given
type is intended to be extensible, that it's an object.  So now you
need to decide what your parser will do when faced with names in this
object that were not known when the C code was generated.  There's two
options: ignore them, or make them available as a C representation of
an object with all the unexpected names.  The latter can be important
at times (e.g., when you're eventually going to re-encode the inputs
and you want to preserve those unknown bits).

So far so good.  But if you make every type extensible by default,
then you're polluting those C structs and the generated code even if
mostly you don't need extensibility -- this is the PITA.  IMO
extensibility needs to be requested explicitly, but then the problem
you run into is people forgetting to do so.

Nico
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