[DGD] Question for programmers and builders

[Noah Gibbs]

--- Par Winzell <zell at skotos.net> wrote:
> I think Felix already supplied the vital distinction here... Add, for 
> example, a mudlib-wide interface for editable objects that specify 
> something like
> 
>    string export_ascii_state();
> and
>    void import_ascii_state(string state);

  I'll try this.  Your warning about not having strings with weird characters
is what I was hoping for - that felt like a bad idea, but I couldn't convince
myself that it was true.  Since your warning matches my gut feeling, I'll
assume they're both right :-)

> and use these in any situation where a developer edits any object 
> through any text-based interface (telnet, web, ...).

  Yeah.  I'm not as worried about builders.  As you say, abstract the interface
from the implementation, and I'm not going to make builders do a bitwise edit
of complex data structures :-)  There's no question what the implementation
would be when doing, say, UNQ parsing.  (Note to passers-by:  UNQ is
Phantasmal's rough equivalent of XML and is used for object import and export)

> Still, it was a bad idea. Passing these pseudo-strings off as real 
> strings is very problematic. Given any string containing interesting 
> data, a developer is always going to try to parse it or split it up or 
> insert things into it, etc, and this sort of markup is very fragile. 
> Passing interesting yet fragile data that looks like strings but isn't 
> through developer hands is a recipe for disaster.

  Yes, *this* is what I was thinking, but I wasn't sure I wasn't just being too
cynical :-)

  Thanks!




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