type converion in python

[Alan Kennedy]

Alan Kennedy wrote:

> The solution that the CORBA people took, in the Internet
> InterOperability Protocol or IIOP (actually GIOP, but I'm not going
> there), was to specify a common "wire representation" of all data types,
> to which all compliant implementations must adhere. The CORBA solution
> is a sophisticated one, involving the use of numbers to identify types
> (typecodes), etc.

A quick aside.

I find it interesting that these kind of marshalling interoperability
problems still seem not to have been fully resolved in relation to data
encoding in SOAP. And that's where the data is wrapped in the relatively
flexible medium of an XML document, not the harsh unforgiving
environment of a raw byte stream :-)

Would it be cynical of me to think the big systems vendors have a vested
interest in incompatibilities remaining? At least until the framework
has been built up so large and complex that little people have a far
lower chance of understanding what's going on, let alone being able to
actually build working software. ("That'll teach all those nasty little
CGI-scripter types").

A member of the SOAP committee said it all like so: SOAP used to stand
for "Simple Object Access Protocol": now it's not Simple, it's not
Object-Oriented and it's no longer an Access Protocol.

Don't you love/hate IT politics?

-- 
alan kennedy
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