XML and MONDO

[Mark L. Fussell]

I have had a couple negative reactions to posting the MONDO notes on 
XML-Dev, so I will stop until I have a code release.  I thought I would 
explain the one issue: What does MONDO have to do with XML?

MONDO uses XML as an encoding format for recipes (recipes are similar to 
an event stream but reduced to an even simpler core [e.g. like LISP]).  
Internally, MONDO does not care about what the textual encoding is but 
XML is the most likely to gain widespread acceptance for use with MONDO.

Now if MONDO uses XML, why were all my examples in a different markup
(which MONDO calls OML)?  Simply for brevity and ability to directly show
what is happening (or so I thought).  The transformation between OML and
XML is trivial (they both encode exactly the same
event-stream/data-structure as far as MONDO is concerned).  This is
described in detail in Chapter 4 & 5 & ?11 (an appendix) of the MONDO
Design document.  For example, two common examples are (in XML): 

    <Period>
        <start><Date iso="1997-10-01"/></start>
        <end><Date/></end>
    </Period>

    <Model><types><List>
        <Type name="Date" description = "A Gregorian Calendar Date">
	    <properties><List>
		<Property name="day">
                     <type><TypeReference name="Number"/></type>
                </Property>
		<Property name="month">
                     <type><TypeReference name="Month"/></type>
                </Property>
		<Property name="year">
                     <type><TypeReference name="Number"/></type>
                </Property>

		<Property name="iso">
                     <type><TypeReference name="String"/></type>
                </Property>
            <List></properties>

            <constructors><List>
                 <Constructor><List></List></Constructor>
                 <Constructor><List><String>iso</String></List></Constructor>
            </List></constructors>
        </Type>
    </List></types></Model>

What MONDO's Builder (can be considered a generalization of a 
GroveBuilder) sees would be identical whether in the above or OML.  This 
is part of the benefits of its architecture.  

Aspects of that overall architecture is what I was "promoting" and 
soliciting feedback on, not OML itself.  Again, I probably made the wrong 
choice to put the examples in OML when posting to an XML group, so I 
apologize for that.  

--Mark
mark.fussell at chimu.com





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