Re: P-services interface in Strawman OPES Charter

Alex Rousskov wrote:

> We know how poor humans are at writing bug-free code.  I think that
> being able to validate much of P code off-line is an essential rule
> language feature that we should strive to preserve. Unfortunately,
> that seems to require informing the interpreter of service interface,
> independent of P code itself.

You start convincing me... Could any of the existing service 
description languages (WSDL?) be of help? Abbie was suggesting this 
before I believe...

I see the following options:

(1) Rely on the rules authors to specify the correct parameters
     and don't do any offline checking -> no mechanisms for service
     description needed
(2) Have an OPES specific "service interface description language"
     (maybe similar to function declarations in some programming
     languages?) -> would be part of the rules language (?)
(3) Rely on an existing solution and require OPES services to be
     described in this language -> nothing to do for us other than
     refering to existing solution.

Now, my feeling this that this already goes into discussing the 
solution, I don't see a need to specify any of this in the re-charter. 
The proposed charter text seems to cover and allow for this work, so I 
would assume we're ok in this respect.

> P.S. If P programs are "rules", what should we call P programmers?
>      Rulers? :-)

Sure, OPES rules :)

-Markus