[Moose-dev] Re: MSE Format, latest draft

I did not mean to do no harm. So here... I guess this is just that ... the closer a syntax is to the syntax of the (mainly) used language itself; the easier it is to read and parse it. (Here easier refers to the amount of work for the programmer; not for the machine). If you look at an MSE-file without any MSE-strings in it (since they are "smalltalk-optimized"); you could just open a scheme-evaluator and evaluate it as a list (by just putting a ' in front of it). Then scheme does all the parsing work for you since it just looks exactly the same as what normal scheme lists would look like. Numbers are read probably since scheme uses the same kind of numbers; names are scheme-symbols... and if you don't use '' inside a string to denote '; even strings are read properly like it should. However; true and false are read as symbols true and false instead of the boolean values. Whereas, if the booleans would be #t and #f in the fileformat; this would automatically yield the scheme-true and scheme-false after read-evalling the list. And here the same holds for Smalltalk I guess; if you put # in front of an mse-expression; it just looks like an Array. And smalltalk does all the "hard" work for you. Actually; when I did my first scheme-mse-reader; I just did some basic string-translations on the document which changed true and false into #t and #f; and those strings ('[^']*')+ into things with "\"". Then I just read it as a list. In order to then "parse" it; I don't have to think about "tokens" etc etc; I just traverse a scheme-list in normal recursion. I hope that this clarifies your question? cheers, and now really of to bed :) Toon