Hi Paul,
I really appreciate your efforts in maintaining this discussion, it brings a lot of value to the whole process! We have discussed your comments in the regular meeting this morning. You may hear from others, but here is my perspective. .........
Many thanks for the response Dejan. This is pretty much what I had expected - I do understand the pragmatic reasons behind these decisions, but perhaps I can just summarise my concerns .. 1) If people are expected to make independent implementations of a langauge, they are much more likely to work correctly if the the language is defined by a written semantics, rather then by a reference implementation where people have to guess the significant parts of the semantics by reading someone else's code (for example, "does the order of these elements matter"?) 2) Certainly in the system config area, people at many different levels of skills will be expected to make contributions to an overall configuration, and we have identified the difficulty of learning to use the language as a major barrier to the uptake. Misconfiguration due to language confusion is also a major source of configuration errors. Hand-writing CDL is going to be significantly more difficult than the languages that we have considered previously. I would like to have seem a simpler language which standardised on the well-accepted basics, and left out (or made optional) the more "research"-oriented" features which could be layered on top later. I'll definitely keep you in touch about the workshop outcome, and I'll probably have more questions before then ... :-) Many thanks Paul