A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 10, 2010 21:59 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: A report from OpenSQLCamp by jeremiah
Parent article: A report from OpenSQLCamp

That would be lovely. Downside: XML is horribly verbose and ugly as sin.

(Has anyone written an XML -> sexp bidirectional filter? If not, I should: it wouldn't be hard and would make this stuff *so* much easier for humans to read and write. It's quite an achievement, actually, coming up with something *less* readable than Lisp's sexps... the SGML/XML people should be proud.)

A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 10, 2010 23:40 UTC (Wed) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link] (4 responses)

So I'm trying to visualize this, and failing. I don't suppose you'd toss up an example? I'm curious to see how you'd address a mix of attribute value pairs and element names and content. It's been at least 15 years since I messed with lisp.

I deal with XML every day, and agree with the verbosity and ugliness comment. The only way i can make it palatable is lots of indenting, and syntax highlighting, and even then it's pretty rough some times. I like it's flexibility and ubiquitousness though. I don't hate it nearly as much as I dislike the SQL language.

A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 11, 2010 0:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

There are lots of possible unambiguous mappings. Instead of

you could say

(foo :bar "baz" (:content "quux" (wob (:content "foo")) (:content "blah")))

perhaps. Or, if you don't like the ":content", you could say

(foo (:attr bar "baz") "quux" (wob "foo") "blah")

(yeah, I think the latter is much easier to read. Attributes are less common than content in decent XML, so attributes should be more verbose in the sexpy syntax.)

Note that both these syntaxes render it impossible to close elements in the wrong order and impossible to do the analogue of missing a / out. Those two things on their own make it worthwhile, I think.

(I am by no means the first person to have thought about this. I'm not even the five thousandth.)

A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 11, 2010 1:13 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link] (2 responses)

I most definitely prefer the second, and thanks for the example. I'm going to roll it around in my head for a bit. I am curious to know why you think "Attributes are less common than content in decent XML" though. Most of the XML I deal with is coming out of a DB and generally the table name corresponds to the element name, and the column names to the attribute names etc. This makes for fairly decently readable XML, when a person has to look at it. Sure you run into issues with large content that doesn't really fit with in an attribute, and should be content instead. But for the majority of data that I have to deal with I have very very few content only elements. Do you have any pointers as to why this is a bad thing?

A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 11, 2010 2:11 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link]

Never mind. There was some missed subtlety in my reading of your post.

A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 11, 2010 7:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think it depends on where your data's coming from. I think for the application you were discussing, you're probably right. I tend to deal with XML as a data-interchange format, and while a few of those are slightly self-describing, with datatypes in an attribute, most of them hand you a (generally very buggy) schema and then have no attributes at all in the content.

Note: a nice thing about using a real programming language rather than XML is that you could go the whole hog if you want and eliminate redundancy, although this looks uglier than it should because all my indentation is being eaten by the comment form and because I've only got one line of XML generated, much too little to be worth using this technique:

(let ((type-string '(:attr type "string"))
(type-int '(:attr type "int")))
(foo type-string "quux" (num-foos type-int 6)))

is equivalent to

If you wanted to have 'type's with parameters, let alone optional ones, you'd have to do something a little different:

(flet ((type-float (precision) `(:attr type "float" `(:attr type ,(concat "float-" ,precision)))))
(foo (type-float 6) 14.172))

is equivalent to

Note that the latter is horribly hard to typecheck properly in XML, but having something typecheck the Lisp notation is trivial. Also note that your generator and parser don't need to understand Lisp (although it is so easy the parser might as well understand a restricted subset): it just needs to know how to generate stereotyped let and (for parameterized attributes) flet expressions.