[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Specification Languages
At 13:26 2/28/96, Ben Laurie wrote:
>10. Some other already defined specification language.
>
>Would anyone care to add to this list? Or give some instances of 10?
I don't remember its name now, but there was a DDL designed and implemented
at Stratus [more details as I dredge them up] which took one
data structure definition and generated C, PASCAL, PL/I and maybe a couple
of others.
That language looked C-like [ugh -- I'd rather it looked PASCAL-like] but
it did the job. It defined data structures so that code in different
languages could manipulate the same structured binary files. You couldn't
do everything in this language that you could in each of the target
languages, but you could do enough for system programming.
This language also had the advantage of looking like a programming language
with none of the ASN.1isms [SEQUENCE OF, SET OF, BIT STRING, ...] so that
you were encouraged to think about efficiency of internal representation
and use while you were defining the structure.
Once you have a data structure defined such a way, encoding it for transport
between machines is no big deal. A processor to write pack/parse code
for a given structure is really easy.
- Carl
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
|CyberCash, Inc., Suite 430 http://www.cybercash.com/ |
|2100 Reston Parkway PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 |
|Reston, VA 22091 Tel: (703) 620-4200 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+