Subj : Re: Proposed Data Structure?
To   : stizzed
From : tenser
Date : Wed Jun 03 2020 07:36:58

On 02 Jun 2020 at 01:35p, stizzed pondered and said...
 
 st> Here is my first stab at opening conversation regarding data structure
 st> and format for a new BBSINFO standard.  This example would follow the
 st> Fido standard of a flat file with one record per line, CR/LF terminated
 st> with comma delimiters and no spaces (using underscores instead). It
 st> would differ from the Fido format in that there would be data length
 st> limits.

This conflates two things:

1. A text serialization of some structured data.
2. A binary format for a data structure representing that data.

For (2), specific record layouts are an implementation detail.
For a specification that is (presumably) implemented by many
different systems, there's no need to specify them; they will
vary by language and target system.

For (1), if you're already making a departure from the existing
nodelist format, then take the opportunity to use one of the
many existing structured text formats.  JSON and its variants,
protocol buffers or a variant and their text serializations,
even XML would have significant advantages over an ersatz format.
In particular, they're all extensible and parsers exist for any
number of languages and environments.

In other words, what you really want to define isn't so much a
file format as a schema.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/04/20 (Windows/32)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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