[asterisk-users] Upgrade to Asterisk 1.4 - it's one year's old!

[Tony Plack]

> We're not discussing code or the inner workings of Asterisk or even
> changing the functionality of Asterisk, just what the proper order
> of the words should be.
>
> Most of us users are people, not parsers. The developers? Well,
> that's why they're developers :)
>
> Thanks in advance,

We are discussing the inner workings of Asterisk as this is an Asterisk thread.  With that in mind, we are also discussing the order that a program works best in parsing code.

The real reason that programmers use languages (like C or perl) is that machines are less intelligent than humans.  If we used English to program computers, the computer would have to read the slight nuances that exist in English and just like this thread, we would be asking mathematical machines to make assumptions about what each say.  Who is to say what variant of the English language is to be used, because people may still not understand the syntax of language we use.

That being said, ordering in a command structure should make sense to the application (less intelligent entity), not to the "programmer" (hopefully more intelligent).  Anyone who has configured most applications would agree that they are more of a programming language than a conversational language.

The Asterisk core program doesn't know what verbs each module, channel, res, or function contains.  It must ask the code(noun), for a given verb (function) and then pass that function the options (adjectives).

So if I use show black dogs, with dogs being the module, show being the verb, and black being the option, here is what would happen:

Look for module show -> doesn't exist
Look for module black -> doesn't exist
Look for module dogs -> Found, get reference
Ask module dogs, for function show -> found, get reference
Send option black (remaining words from the parser) to function show in module black.

In my opinion that makes Asterisk slow and introduces bugs if some programmer creates a new app_black which causes a video screen to go black, then we have a problem.

In this example, we are left with fixing the position of the module as position 3 in the command stack.   That also means that additional parameters (options) must limited to one (which doesn't work) or messes with the command structure by placing adjectives after the noun like:

show black dogs dachshund

That doesn't make any sense for humans again.

So then for the computer, we are left with the following syntax that works:

Module Function Option1, Option2, ....

The module is fixed, position 1.
The function is fixed, position 2.
The options are everything that follows.

In our example, that would be:

dogs show black

Is it English?  No but it isn't Spanish, Italian, and whatever language I have left out.  It is Asterisk and computers.  It also means profitable employment for people willing to learn this language.

We could fix the verbs that are used, but that means that every module would have to have the same core verbs and we could have no exceptions.  That means that ZAP, SIP, and MeetMe could have no functions that adhere outside the standards OR that most modules would have huge amounts of unnecessary functions which do nothing but take up space and cause bugs.