geda-developers team mailing list archive

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

Hey all,


This summer, if I have time, I'm thinking about writing a utility
that can read/write all of pcb's file formats back to 2004 (or as
far as seems feasible), convert between them, do compatibility
checks, better syntax checks, etc.


I have a few design goals:

  1. Have a separate parser/writer for each format version (using the
     FileVersion[] field to decide which one when reading).

  2. Be modular enough that we can bolt on the new extensible format,
     should such a thing ever materialize.

  3. Have a usable API so that other software (say, the web-interface
     guy or maybe even pcb itself) can use it eventually.
     
  4. Be solid. Speed is not so much a concern. Things that ARE a concern:
     reliability, code documentation, testing, proper memory usage.
     For this reason, bison is probably unsuitable, but we'll see.


As far as languages go, I'm looking at D. It is link-compatible with C,
has a good OO model, has pre/post conditions built in, is very Doxygen
friendly, and will manage memory for you. It has had a pretty unstable
history, but it looks like version 2 is here to stay, and compilers are
showing up in mainstream distributions.


Does anyone have thoughts or comments?


-- 
Andrew Poelstra
Email: asp11 at sfu.ca OR apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web:   http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew
"You shouldn't trust every quote you read on the Internet." -- Socrates