| 摘要 |
The present invention-called Efficient Description Language EDL-concerns methods to describe, parsers and generators of as well as systems storing, processing, transmitting or using arbitrary hierarchical data structures in a platform independent format and overcomes the prior art limitations using only a single starting respectively terminating character to introduce respectively terminate individual branches and data elements. Branches may contain any number of sub-branches and data elements in any order. The maximum nesting level of sub-branches is not limited. Branches and/or data elements may be anonymous or named and associated with a named type, multiple named attributes, default values or value range restrictions. EDL-documents may reference other EDL-documents to include them in the referencing document. Referenced documents may contain references to other EDL-documents, as long as no circular reference chain results. EDL-documents may include control statements to efficiently describe conditional or repeating content. EDL-documents are very easy to read, create and maintain by humans-even without extensive training-and can be generated, parsed and processed faster than platform independent documents in prior art languages. To describe identical data structures with identical content EDL-documents require on average ~50% less meta characters and ~33% less storage capacity and communication bandwidth compared to HTML, XML or SGML-documents. In total, EDL is more efficient than prior art platform independent languages and reduces the overall development, building, operation and maintenance costs of heterogenous distributed communication and information processing systems.
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