Re: [Monotone-devel] monotone automate stdio

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 10:36:32AM -0500, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> On 5/19/05, Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 07:13:11PM -0500, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> > > It uses operator>>(istream, string) . So items are whitespace
> > > separated, and whitespace is ignored.
> > 
> > Not so good; items could conceivably contain whitespace...
> > 
> > I have this slighly unusual quirk; I can't stand process spawn apis
> > that take a string instead of a list of strings.  Drives me batty...
> > why would anyone ever _do_ that? ;-)
> 
> How about a series of <length> colon <string> items, like we were
> thinking for the output?
> 7:parents40:0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567

Hmm, re-read my original mail ;-):

 > Maybe make the format the constant "l", then a bunch
 > of <decimal length><constant ":"><that many characters> argument
 > strings, then the constant "e" to mark the end of the list.
 > Semi-arbitrary, but happens to be the same as bencoding :-).

Your proposal lacks a way to tell where the beginning and end of a
command fall (remember that a bunch of these are being sent to stdin
sequentially).  So, I suggested, stick a constant "l" at the beginning
(for "list", in bencoding), and a constant "e" at the end (for "end").
Seems as good as anything else.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
So let us espouse a less contested notion of truth and falsehood, even
if it is philosophically debatable (if we listen to philosophers, we
must debate everything, and there would be no end to the discussion).
  -- Serendipities, Umberto Eco