> > Well actually I was thinking that someone might, say, write, say, a
> > Freenet discussion forum client which people could use, and then only
> > the author of the client would need to know about Sesil - I certainly
> > don't expect the general public to learn or understand Sesil! 
> While I still don't believe that discussion forums will work (see my earlier
> post which you did not respond to), I don't think that specialized clients for
> everysingle ruleset sounds good at all.

I can't find it - could you sent it to me offlist?

> If the current "everything on the web" thing (started by Hotmail) tells us
> anything it is that people do not like to download specialized clients.

Oh come on, there is no basis for that claim.  Hotmail is popular
because it just-so-happens that reading and sending email over the web
works reasonably well.  I could point to the success of Napster, Winamp,
Netscape mail & news, and a whole host of clients that people do
download and do use.

> Anyways, by general public I mean the general public that I give a damn about
> (ie the Linux/geek computer literrate general public who can write their own
> shell scripts).

The language is pretty easy to use, personally I am very comfortable in
coding in RPN directly (as are any people - just look at how many people
use RPN calculators), but it would be trivial to write a parser to
convert between RPN and Polish Notation, or a Lisp-style layout.  Better
still, a graphical tool could be created relatively easily which would
allow the design of Sesil subspace definitions.

> > > You compare it to java bytecode, so I also guess you want to use byte 
> > > commands?
> >
> > No, there are only 3 datatypes, Number (represented as a Java double),
> > String, and Boolean.
> 
> I meant, do you want a human readable code or easily machine readable. In 
> other
> words, is check signature CHECK_SIGNATURE() or 0x4A?

Ah, yes, it is all human-readable (as you will see if you take a look at
Freenet/subspaces/Sesil.java).

> If you want to use a language that most users won't want to write for manually
> anyways, I would suggest the latter as we want to make things as easy for the
> nodes as possible, and not waste bandwidth.

Since only inserts will need to contain a copy of the language, I don't
really think bandwidth will be much of an issue, most Sesil programs
will probably be less than 1k in length, when compaired to 6 or 7 MB
files which will probably be common on Freenet, I don't think there is
any need to worry too much about this.  Using a human-readable syntax
also makes the language much easier to extend and doesn't place any 256
command limits on things.  

If you are really that paranoid about bandwidth then forget Sesil, there
are many ways that we could redesign the message format to make it more
compact ;-)

More importantly, I have already implemented the human-readable parser
;-)

Ian.

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