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Original Message From: "Michael Kay"
> One thing I'd like to bring in from the JSON world is some basic duck
> typing.
>
> <person age=90 dob=1920-03-04 name="Ronald" retired=true
> children=["Barbara", "Michael"]/>
>
> There's no need for a DTD or schema to do simple type annotation.
I'm not convinced that the typing in JSON is a key feature. If you don't
know what a 'wibble' is, knowing it is an integer doesn't really help you
much. I think it's an artifact of JSON being based on Javascript that it
has these different forms for integers vs. strings etc. A program does need
to know whether something is an integer. A transfer format just needs to
get across the wire some suitable representation of wibble that a program
can use. As part of knowing how to deal with a wibble, the program knows
that a wibble is an integer.
I would say your sample is fairly exlicit typing. (I guess there is
ambiguity around whether 'age' is an integer, float or decimal.) But I
think duck typing would work pretty much as well if you had regular XML:
<person age='90' dob='1920-03-04' name="Ronald" retired='true'
children='["Barbara", "Michael"]'/>
In the case of Javascript it would be sensible to duck type age to a number
as it doesn't need much provocation to convert a number to a string. For
example:
var json = { "Int" : 12, "Int2" : 14 };
var result = "The sum is: " + json.Int + json.Int2;
document.write( result );
yields:
The sum is: 1214
Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Interface XML to C++ the easy way using C++ XML
data binding to convert XSD schemas to C++ classes.
Visit http://codalogic.com/lmx/ or http://www.xml2cpp.com
for more info
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