IDL?

[Andrew Layman]

I have to agree with Paul here.  If the interface is only implementable in a
single language, then you've failed.  Programmers need to make engineering
tradeoffs among a number of factors, and will sometimes very reasonably
choose one language over another.  We could expediently pick one language
and ignore all others in order to simplify the problem a little, but that
would be letting the solution dictate the problem. I don't recommend it,
since it would simply mean that the parsers written in other languages would
be guaranteed incompatible.

--Andrew Layman
   AndrewL at microsoft.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Paul Prescod [SMTP:papresco at technologist.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, December 17, 1997 12:30 PM
> To:	xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
> Subject:	Re: IDL?
> 
> Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> > 
> > The interface has to be simple enough for people like me to understand
> and
> > to tell my friends what it's about. I would prefer to limit the
> Consumers,
> > Factories and the rest to as few as possible.
> 
> An IDL interface implies no extra complication in the Java interface. It
> merely describes the Java interface in terms that are more universal
> than Java itself -- it is like a DTD for interfaces. So far nobody has
> yet proposed anything that would make an IDL description impossible. All
> I ask is that:
> 
> a) nobody do so later (e.g. require runtime lookup of Java class objects
> or do something simiarly brain-dead) and 
> 
> b) implementations in other languages be considered "successes" in terms
> of the success/failure of this project.
> 
> I don't think that either of these constraints endanger the success of
> the Java-specific part of the project or make the Java-specific part
> more difficult.
>  
>  Paul Prescod
> 
> 
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