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

Mr. Nitpicker looks at the XML RPC specification...

Author:Fredrik Lundh
Posted:1/14/1999; 3:46:39 PM
Topic:Scripting on Windows
Msg #:2134 (In response to 2086)
Prev/Next:2133 / 2135

(or: "And now for something completely different")

A few things that struck me while hacking on xmlrpclib.py. To be answered when and if anyone finds the time...

1. Is "boolean" a distinct data type, or can boolean values be interchanged with integers (e.g. zero=false, non-zero=true)?

2. What is the legal syntax (and range) for integers? How to deal with leading zeros? Is a leading plus sign allowed? How to deal with whitespace?

3. What is the legal syntax (and range) for floating point values (doubles)? How is the exponent represented? How to deal with whitespace? Can infinity and "not a number" be represented?

4. What characters are allowed in strings? Non-printable characters? Null characters? Can a "string" be used to hold an arbitrary chunk of binary data?

5. Does the "struct" element keep the order of keys. Or in other words, is the struct "foo=1, bar=2" equivalent to "bar=2, foo=1" or not?

6. Can the "fault" struct contain other members than faultCode and faultString? Is there a global list of faultCodes? (so they can be mapped to distinct exceptions for languages like Python and Java)?

7. What timezone should be assumed for the dateTime.iso8601 type? UTC? localtime?

(that's all for now)

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