RE: Code generation or forms?

> > Natural language instructions are OK when the intelligent agent is
> expected
> > to be a human operating a browser or other user agent. If you had an XML
> > form you could define a description tag or attribute that would do the
> trick
> > -- just imagine WADL like <parameter name="appid" type="xsd:string"
> > required="true" description="The application id" />. In a forms language
> > this description is not a "nice to have"; it's essential so that a
> client
> > program can display it to the user. In a code generation scenario, this
> > description is optional, or need not be formalized, since it's only the
> > programmer, reading the service documentation at design time, who needs
> to
> > understand the meanings of the parameters.
> 
> Why is it optional for code generation? Knowledge of type and
> optionality of arguments are precisely the kind of data that I'd expect
> to have to generate useful code. E.g. so I could throw an exception if a
> request is sent without required parameters, or to generate type-safe
> methods.
> 

A programmer surely has to be able to read it somewhere. He could read a
description of parameters in a book, or on a web page somewhere. A
description attribute is a sensible place to keep the description nearby
some other relevant stuff. But a description attribute is useless to a code
generator. A code generator cannot do anything useful with a natural
language description like "Date of birth".

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2005 16:16:13 UTC