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From: Natacha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: S-expression I/O in Ada
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 03:47:15 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2010-08-14T03:47:15-07:00
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On Aug 13, 9:23=A0pm, Jeffrey Carter
<spam.jrcarter....@spam.not.acm.org> wrote:
> On 08/13/2010 02:10 AM, Natacha Kerensikova wrote:
> > I can assure you what I'm doing is completely conform with Rivest's
> > standard proposition. I don't know how come it has not reached the
> > status of full-fledged RFC (while real RFCs like SPKI do depend on
> > it), but I'm using it as if it had. I only dropped the "display hint"
> > stuff from the format, because I find it little to no use, while it
> > introduces quite a bit of complexity.
>
> Yes, things are murkier than I realized. S-expressions seem to have origi=
nated
> with Lisp, long before Rivest's proposal, but the cons-pair is an impleme=
ntation
> detail, not an inherent part of the syntax, so lists can have zero or mor=
e elements.

That's exactly how I feel towards this whole S-expression deal.

I didn't know anything about lisp or cons pairs (except that lisp
involves lots of nested parentheses), I just stumbled on Rivest's de
facto standard when I was looking for a simple and easy-to-use
external data format.

And since then I've always been alone with that format. Usually it was
because people freaked out because of parentheses, now it's because
I'm doing everything wrong (i.e. not according to the one true cons
pair idea), but the end result is the same.

Anyway, I knew from the beginning switching from C to Ada won't
increase the number of people using, or even only reading, my code.
Starting from 1 (me), the result was very predictable.


Thanks for your help,
Natacha