Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] dtc: Support character literals in bytestrings

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Grant Likely [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 01:51:49PM +1000, David Gibson wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 04:15:40PM -0700, Anton Staaf wrote:

quoted

With this patch the following property assignment:

    property = ['a' 2b '\r'];

is equivalent to:

    property = [61 2b 0d];

So, I still have some reservations about this syntax.

It occurred to me: do you actually need to intermix character and
hexbyte values that much?  Could I suggest an alternate sytax as:

      property = 'a', [2b], 'r';

The new character literals sufficiently distinct not to cause problems
here, and it maintains the , == bytestring append behaviour we already
have.

Thoughts?

Does it matter much?  I'm happy with either.  Is there a downside to
the first syntax?

I don't think it matters that much, though in my use case of encoding
a keyboard mapping table I do actually intermix character literals and
two character hex values a lot.  In particular, I use 00 to indicate a
key that is not present in the scan matrix.  I also use hex values
with the top bit set to indicate special characters, such as modifiers
or arrow keys.  So I guess I have a slight preference for my original
syntax, which has another advantage of looking a bit more C-like.
Though I could certainly use the alternate syntax as well.  One last
thought, the alternate syntax will require quite a few additional
commas and square brackets, most likely causing my tables to wrap and
thus get become even longer in the dts file.

Thanks,
    Anton

g.