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Re: specification language?
> These needs seem to take us down the road of an ASCII representation which
is
> very extensible. I see two possible candidates, we can try to hack arround
with
> RFC 822 headers or we can use s-expressions. I prefer the second (I think).
s-exprs are an interesting idea that had occurred to me also. If you can make
the s-expr double as a tagged, recursive structure (like a nested assoc list
in LISP), then it is very close to back-compatible with RFC 822. Simple apps
can potentially ignore tags and levels of detail they don't understand or
don't need, and of course it is potentially evaluatable and well suited for
input to powerful proof systems. (And you can write them down, although
they might be a tad long!! Compact binary representations are also possible,
if needed, for otw.).
Sounds like a very appealing mix of power and simplicity to me.
Cheers,
Frank O'Dwyer.
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