[U-Boot-Users] RFC: New U-boot image format

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 04:39:38PM -0600, Scott Wood wrote:
> Marian Balakowicz wrote:
>> I was thinking of a syntax that would be similar to regular data
>> sections which are enclosed in [] braces. Something like:
>> prop = {/path/to/file};
>
> This one overloads {} based primarily on whether there's an equal sign 
> before it... a bit icky.  Plus, sooner or later we'll run out of special 
> characters to assign meaning to, and we'll become Perlish in the process. 
> :-)

Indeed.  Plus I'd liked to keep { } consistently for delimiting
lexical contexts which will accept node or property names without
quoting.

Plus you can't even count on the { being after an =, because you could have:

	prop = "a string followed by", {/a/file};

> I went with text-between slashes as it's an already-established keyword 
> marker.
>
>> or prop = [file:/path/to/file];
>
> This is ambiguous; file: will be scanned as a label unless we give 
> precedence to it as a keyword, and I don't think we want to go down the 
> path of reserved words when we have other mechanisms available to separate 
> the namespaces.

And it's gratuitously similar to bytestring notation.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson