Generated versus Original SIDL files

Generated SIDL files may differ from their original SIDL files in several respects in terms of content as well as layout. These differences are summarized below.

Packages.
The code generation is limited to one high-level package per generated file. In fact, the name of the generated file is currently defined to be the concatenation of the name of the highest-level package and .sidl.

Versioning.
The generation of requires statements is inferred from the symbols that actually appear in the associated interface descriptions. The intent is to provide a requires statement for only the highest level package needed of a given version. Consequently, requires and imports statements that were not necessary for resolving symbols will not appear. Also, fully qualified names will be shortened in the generated files due to the automatic generation of the associated requires statement(s). Finally, since an import and require statement can be used in a SIDL file and no distinction is made in the XML, only a require statement will appear in the generated file.

Implements.
Since there is no distinction between implements-all and implements in the XML version of the interfaces, the generated code outputs implements along with the inherited methods.

Comments.
Babel preserves only document, or doc, comments so any comments that do not conform will not appear in the generated file 13.1.

Whitespace.
Obviously there may be whitespace differences in the generated file. These include indentation, blank spaces and lines, and brace placement.

As an example, suppose we have a package in the file foo.sidl. The original file's contents are:


package foo version 1.0 {

  class A {}

  package bar version 2.0 {
    class B {}
  }

}

The resulting contents of the generated SIDL file are:


package foo version 1.0 {

  class A {
  }

  package bar version 2.0 {

    class B {
    }

  }


}

Notice the differences in white space. To illustrate more features, further suppose we have a package in the file fooTest.sidl. The original file's contents are:


// An ignored comment
require foo version 1.0;
require foo.bar version 2.0;

/**
 * Test of doc comment with XML special characters < & >.
 */
package fooTest version 0.1 {

  /**
   * Another doc comment for an empty class.
   */
  class A extends foo.bar.B {}

  class B extends foo.A {}
}

The resulting contents of the generated SIDL file are:


require foo version 1.0;
require foo.bar version 2.0;

/**
 * Test of doc comment with XML special characters < & >.
 */
package fooTest version 0.1 {

  /**
   * Another doc comment for an empty class.
   */
  class A extends foo.bar.B {
  }

  class B extends foo.A {
  }

}

Here we see the exclusion of non-document comments and the retention of document comments. Refer to Section 5.2 and Appendix  C for more information about document comments.



babel-0.10.2
users_guide Last Modified 2005-03-23

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