Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 2/3] qapi: Add a primitive to include other files from a QAPI schema file

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

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On 03/13/2014 09:33 AM, Benoît Canet wrote:

>> We certainly can't do without comments.
>>
>> JSON is designed for easy data exchange, but we use it as programming
>> language syntax.  Its restrictions make sense for easy data exchange,
>> but hurt our use.  We're not the first ones experiencing that pain:
>> http://json5.org/
>>
>> No idea how much momentum this JSON5 thingy has...

If we 's,#,//,', our comments magically fall in line with JSON5 syntax;
everything else in our files is already compliant with JSON5.

>>
>> Switch to JSON5 and call it qapi-schema.json5?

This actually seems like a rather nice idea - but due to our choice of
comments, it means rewriting the bulk of the file and tweaking our parser.

>>
> 
> Hmm don't we want something that python and other language know how to parse out
> of the box ? Or will we write yet another delicate work of art to parse it ?

Our existing parser would only need to learn a new comment syntax to
parse the subset of JSON5 that we currently actually use.  Parsing FULL
JSON5 would mean also learning about trailing commas, unquoted names in
name:value pairs, multiline strings, and alternative numeric
representations.  But a point made on the JSON5 page is that ES5
JavaScript already parses JSON5, just as it already parses original JSON.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org


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