[DGD] Phantasmal's UNQ system.

[Carter Cheng]

Sorry about the late reply but thank you. I was hoping
to take a look at phantasmal again before replying to
this but haven't found the time yet- but I think with
what you have told me I should be able to figure the
rest out.

--- Noah Gibbs <noah_gibbs at yahoo.com> wrote:

>   I'll assume in my reply that you're planning to
> use Phantasmal's "UNQable"
> library and parser.  The interface might be
> different if you implemented it
> differently.
> 
>   The UNQable type allows you to export UNQ either
> in list/tree format, or as
> text.  You have your object inherit from UNQable,
> and supply either a function
> to convert the object to UNQ list/tree format, a
> function to convert it to
> text, or both.  The main functionality you get out
> of all this is the ability
> to have Phantasmal convert from list/tree to text
> automatically, and a fairly
> uniform, human-editable output format.
> 
>   There are similar functions to convert from UNQ
> tree format or text.  When
> parsing, you can supply a DTD (Document Type
> Definition) to aid the parser in
> recognizing whether the UNQ you just read fits the
> type you're trying to read. 
> It's pretty much exactly like what XML uses for the
> same purpose.
> 
>   I save my object rather manually -- I call the
> function to convert them to
> UNQ text, then write that text to a file.  Have a
> look at Phantasmal's InitD,
> and the functions it calls on other daemons.  The
> MapD and ZoneD, both in
> /usr/common/sys, do fairly interesting save/load
> routines so you can see what
> using UNQ for this purpose looks like.  The MapD
> hands off to the simple_room
> object for most object save/load stuff, so
> simple_room is another good one to
> look at.
> 
>   You might ask, "why not use XML?"  There are two
> answers.  One is that XML
> has those annoying extra options, the ones with
> equals signs and quotation
> marks (see below).  The other answer is, if I wanted
> to use XML without that
> and then give a parse error on perfectly valid XML
> code, I could but it would
> be misleading and annoying to my readers.  I'd
> rather follow an uncommon
> standard correctly and accurately than write a
> faulty implementation of a
> common standard.
> 
>   Incidentally, Skotos uses variant XML for this, so
> my rationale doesn't
> convince everybody :-)
> 
>   For reference:
> 
> <xmltag option="option-text">body</xmltag>
> 
> ~unqtag{body}
> 
>   Note that UNQ uses a slightly different format --
> just a closing curly brace,
> not the full tag name being repeated, and no extra
> options after the tag name
> but before the body.
> 
> --- Carter Cheng <carter_cheng at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > Is there a guide on the UNQ system somewhere? I
> have
> > been trying to understand this. I apologize if
> this is
> > a bit newbieish again but where is the entry point
> > into this subsystem? i.e. if I wanted to create my
> own
> > zone files how does the UNQ parser know where to
> find
> > the zone file and correctly initialize objects
> from
> > it?
> > 
> >  
> > ___________________________________________
> > https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>        
>
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