On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 17:38 +0800, James Henstridge wrote: >Havoc Pennington wrote: > >>XML is a crappy programming language. It's just a lot more convenient to >>write code as code. >> >> >At the same time, C header files are missing a lot of the information >you'd want to include in the metadata. You'll either end up with a lot >of ugly comments in the header (for an extreme case, look at something >like librpm's headers ...), or have the information separate from the >definitions (which can result on them becoming out of date). > >Having the C header files generated from a file written in some IDL that >can represent all the metadata would mean that the C header only need >include things relevant to C, and be fairly clean. Let me add in that the portions of the C headers that are interesting for introspection are not the bits that are really 'code'. #define statements, C binding shortcuts - sure write those in C. But any non C languages that publish their API via this introspection mechanism will also need to do something->XML - so starting in XML makes a lot of sense to me, then build XML->C, ->C++ ->python etc. Cheers, Rob -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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