Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Is XML-RPC a scripting environment?

Author:Skip Montanaro
Posted:1/20/1999; 12:48:44 PM
Topic:Frontier on MacOS X Server
Msg #:2327 (In response to 2293)
Prev/Next:2326 / 2328

> We can make Perl better by including booleans in the wire protocol,
> clearly Perl must have *some* convention for what a boolean is,
> right? How could you program without booleans? So if the language
> doesn't have support for boolean, we could simply say when Perl gets
> a  true it is always turned into a 1 and a false is
> always 0.

The problem is going the other way. When Perl sends a 1 as "true" it will get encoded as 1. If the server that decodes that message to an int passes it to a function that really does distinguish between booleans and ints (Pascal, anyone?), you'll get a fault.

I think Fredrik's solution, to define True and False objects in the XML RPC library, is a good one. The client-side programmer can insert those values into the call (perhaps in the stub routine), knowing they will be properly encoded and interpreted on the server.

Skip

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