[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA proposal ...

[Jack O'Quin]

Fons Adriaensen <fons.adriaensen at skynet.be> writes:

> On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 11:31:01AM -0500, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> 
> > I'm having trouble figuring out Fons' original point here, though I'm
> > sure he has one.  Simple and human readable are worthwhile goals, but
> > hard to reconcile.
> 
> Strange.. I'd think these two would go hand in hand...
> 
> Whit 'simple' and 'line by line' I mean
> 
> - you read in a line with fgets()
> - look at the first word, a keyword that tells you all about the format
>   of the line
> - use sscanf() to read the rest.

Ah.  I thought you meant syntactic simplicity, not the ease of writing
an ad-hoc parser.  I fully agree that the size of the library should
be moderate.  But, I'm not much in favor of basing a language on
fgets() and sscanf().  Made-up languages like that are often
syntactically more complex than you might think.  Try writing the BNF
if this is not clear.

> > Why rule out XML?  It's one of the few widely-used language groups
> > that actually sorta meets both those requirements (*fairly* simple and
> > *somewhat* human-readable).  ;-)
> 
> *somewhat* if properly formatted and indented. And evven then it's
> bloated. XML was one of the reasons I gave up on Gnome. After having read
> the forests (a forest is a lot of trees) for weeks I still was unable
> to kill the file browser permanently.

I'm no great lover of XML, but at least its syntax is sufficiently
well-defined that it's easy to write a pretty-print script.

> > The other examples that readily come to mind are even worse.  LISP
> > appeals to me as an alternative, but that's probably not what he
> > wants, either.
> 
> LISP is quite nice actually, but you'd need a complete LISP engine to
> read it...

That wasn't really a serious suggestion.  The libguile.so.12.3.0 file
on my system is over half a meg.  Would all the LADSPA hosts be
willing to add that and whatever else it entails to their memory
footprint?

Libxml2 is even bigger, almost a meg.  I wonder how many LADSPA hosts
already use it for some other reason?  I see that ardour, jamin and
hydrogen do...

  $ ldd `which ardour` | grep xml
	libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2 (0x40297000)

-- 
  joq