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A comment on MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small. Parent comment

Re:MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small by btilly on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @07:11PM (#22540971)
Yes, comments tend to be turned over time into hints, directives, etc, etc, etc.

But that doesn't change the fact that people put comments into machine protocols.

For another example, lots of machine to machine protocols specify XML. Such as SOAP. They therefore all support comments.

In accord to the general trend, eventually they get abused into having a semantic meaning. For example https://support.ptc.com/help/windchill/wc111_hc/whc_en/index... shows how one system uses comments in SOAP to create documentation and a WSDL that lets interfaces to your code to be automatically generated.

And so comments eventually become executable. But that doesn't change the fact that comments can exist in machine to machine formats.

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Re:MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small by Mikhail_Edoshin on Thursday March 12, 2020 @05:55AM (#22555210)
BTW, XML actually has what can be called "executable comments": processing instructions. They are very basic, but unlike plain comments they have two parts: target name and opaque instruction for the target. If one needs to use comments for some sinister purpose, at least processing instructions may be a better fit.
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