Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 10:18:17 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] Adding an S-expression structured output printer.
Message-ID: <20121201151817.GF4681@mit.edu>
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	<871ufa9jpm.fsf@qmul.ac.uk> <m2txs6vwdy.fsf@guru.guru-group.fi>
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Cc: Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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Quoth Mark Walters on Dec 01 at 12:24 pm:
> 
> On Sat, 01 Dec 2012, Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 01 2012, Mark Walters wrote:
> >
> >> Hi
> >>
> >> Overall I like the series: I think I agree with all of Jani's
> >> comments. 
> >>
> >> My one extra comment is that I think we should decide on whether we also
> >> want a sexp plist version. I think we might want one for the emacs
> >> front-end as that currently uses plists for everything.
> >>
> >> If we do we might want to change the names a little, both for functions
> >> and options (eg sexp_a and sexp_p or something). Probably a lot of
> >> sprinter-sexp would be common to both versions.
> >
> > This is an important question that needs to be addressed fast: options
> > are:
> >
> > 1) have options to spit both alist & plist formats
> > 2) when converting emacs to use s-expressions, convert it to use alists
> > 3) start using plists instead of alists in Peter's android client
> 
> Ok I have looked at this and the changes needed to output plist (or
> both) are pretty small: the only functions from sprinter-sexp.c that
> need to be changed are sexp_end and sexp_map_key. The total diff from
> alist to plist is about 10 lines. I have a version which allows both
> (the same sprinter file creates both possibilities) and have hooked it
> into emacs/notmuch-show.el and it all seems to work. 
> 
> (Search is more difficult as that uses the async parser; indeed even for
> show I used sexp-at-point as suggested by Tomi which seems rather
> underdocumented but does seem to work)

I'm happy to write an async sexp parser.  I specifically designed the
async JSON parser with later switching to sexps in mind, so I already
have a plan for how to do this.