Introduction

Lately I have had time to improve the tool support for Eiffel configuration files written in the Pyxis format, by the introduction of syntax highlighting in the gedit text editor and tools for converting XML to Pyxis. For those that are not familiar, Pyxis is an alternative syntax for XML files inspired by the Python programming language.

Introduction

Although XML was designed to be a human readable data description language it does not compare well to other data description languages in terms of clarity and readability.

Using expanded types for enumerations or aliased type names:

expanded class MY_ENUMERATION
convert
 value: {INTEGER_32}
feature
 make (value_a: INTEGER_32)
  do
   value := value_a
  end
feature
 value: INTEGER_32
end

It's as simple as that.