Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Extending "automate stdio"

[Timothy Brownawell]

On Sun, 2006-07-16 at 22:59 -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 16, 2006 at 06:51:32PM -0500, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> > It's apparently for "list" (and the 'e' is "end"), and comes from
> > something called "bencoding".
> > 
> > ...looking to see what bencoding is, Google gives
> > http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification . Which shows that the
> > current input is *exactly* a series of bencoded lists of strings. Which
> > makes me wonder if maybe it would be good to try to keep the new format
> > as valid bencoding?
> 
> *cough* Coincidence, I swear!
> 
> There isn't really any critical need to, uh, preserve bittorrent
> compatibility; it was more just a "if we need an arbitrary format, we
> might as well just use someone else's that already got written down".
> For the particular case of options, one could indeed just use the
> dictionary encoding there (requiring keys and values to both be
> strings).
> 
> Of course, IIRC the output is not bencode compatible anyway.

Yeah, it's not... and upon further consideration the dictionary encoding
probably wouldn't work anyway, since I'm guessing keys should be unique
(not explicitly stated there, but I'm inferring it from the (stated)
requirement that they have to be sorted).

Tim