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

["Pete Cordell" <[e-mail]>]

----- Original Message From: "Nico Williams"
>> 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.

A PITA, true, but not as big a PITA as when somebody forgets it or convinces 
themselves that they're never going to need it.  In my experience change is 
the only constant in data structures!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
C++ tools for C++ programmers, http://codalogic.com
Read & write XML in C++, http://www.xml2cpp.com