> > a) The client-side programmer has to be responsible for parsing the
> > returned string, which could cause problems if the output format of the
> > ADT is changed, and
> You seem to be proposing that we instead expose the internal storage
> format of the ADT, which seems to me to be much more likely to change
> than the string representation. (Not to mention that it will open up a
> host of platform compatibility issues --- endianness, struct packing,
> float format rules for example.)
That is one possibility, but I think the proposal is to expose the
*support* for the data types to client-side apps. So we would have
librar(ies) which allow parsing the stringified representation of a
value into an acceptable internal format on the client, along with some
support code for working with the values.
That is a Good Idea in principle. In practice, someone would need to
take ownership of the project and develop an style and technique for
packaging support for data types in this way...
- Thomas
