[PROPOSAL] enhanced table dumping

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Tue Jan 18 12:09:00 CET 2005


Greg Watson <gwatson at lanl.gov> writes:

> An arbitrary graph seems to be adding additional complexity that we don't really
> need. Do you have an example of where a tree won't actually suffice?

The way interrupts are hooked up on most every board, I have seen including
dec alphas.  

When you add to that the problems of designing something that is multiplatform
and must continue to use whatever format we settle upon potentially forever 
we need to be careful.  

I admit that to work with an arbitrary graph between devices is a little
harder to work with.  Largely however this is 5 lines of code little.  

The big advantage a tree has is for internal processing because you get
a well defined order for operating on it.  A graph does not have this property
but as most of the structure will be a tree extracting the appropriate trees
should not be difficult for a client.

> The nice thing about s-expressions is that it deals with both the structure and
> representation.

None of this prevents use from using s-expressions, it simply means we can't
use the most obvious application of s-expressions.

Eric



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