[cddlm] CDL specification
Paul Anderson
dcspaul at inf.ed.ac.uk
Thu Feb 24 01:42:15 CST 2005
>Hi Paul,
>
>I really appreciate your efforts in maintaining this discussion, it
>brings a lot of value to the whole process! We have discussed your
>comments in the regular meeting this morning. You may hear from others,
>but here is my perspective. .........
Many thanks for the response Dejan. This is pretty much what I had
expected - I do understand the pragmatic reasons behind these
decisions, but perhaps I can just summarise my concerns ..
1) If people are expected to make independent implementations of a
langauge, they are much more likely to work correctly if the
the language is defined by a written semantics, rather then by
a reference implementation where people have to guess the
significant parts of the semantics by reading someone else's
code (for example, "does the order of these elements matter"?)
2) Certainly in the system config area, people at many different
levels of skills will be expected to make contributions to an
overall configuration, and we have identified the difficulty of
learning to use the language as a major barrier to the uptake.
Misconfiguration due to language confusion is also a major
source of configuration errors. Hand-writing CDL is going to
be significantly more difficult than the languages that we
have considered previously.
I would like to have seem a simpler language which standardised on
the well-accepted basics, and left out (or made optional) the more
"research"-oriented" features which could be layered on top later.
I'll definitely keep you in touch about the workshop outcome, and
I'll probably have more questions before then ... :-)
Many thanks
Paul
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