AXON: Data Patterns

AXON represents data with the help of compositions of several patterns of structuring and notation of data.

Data Structures

There are atomic values at the bottom level: unicode strings, integers, floats, decimals, dates/times, boolean and binary data in base64 encoding.

Complex data structures represented in AXON as compositions of anonymous and named data structures.

Anonymous data structure is dict, ordered dict, list, tuple:

• dict is unordered collection of key:value pairs.
• ordered dict is ordered collection of key:value pairs.
• list is ordered collection of values.
• tuple is fixed ordered collection of values.

Named data structure is a node. It has a name, can have oredered collection of attributes (name:value pairs) and can have oredered collection of values.

AXON uses three kind of syntax for notation of named complex data:

• compact form with {}
• fromatted form with {}
• formatted form without {}

Examples

• compact form with braces:

person {name:"Andrew" age:27}
collection{item{id:1 val:12} item{id:2 val:24} item{id:3 val:48}

• fromatted form with braces:

person {
    name: "Andrew"
    age: 27
}
collection {
    item {
        id: 1
        val: 12 }
    item {
        id: 2
        val: 24}
    item {
        id: 3
        val: 48}

• formatted form without braces:

person
    name: "Matthew"
    age: 27

collection
    item
        id: 1
        val: 12
    item
        id: 2
        val: 24
    item
        id: 3
        val: 48

Anonymous complex values

There are two pattern that used both in JSON and AXON. These are list (array in JSON) and dict (object in JSON).

Additional tuple is supposed to represent n-tuples of values: pairs, triples, quads, ... In contrast to list, tuple is a fixed ordered collection of values.

List

List represents a sequence of values. Just as list in Python, but without comma (','): values in the list are separeted by space characters (' ', '\t', '\n', '\r').

For example:

[]
[1 2 3]
["one"
 "two"
 "three"]

Dict

Dict represents an unordered collection of key : value pairs. Just as dict in python and associative array in javascript, but also without comma (','): key:value pairs in the dict are separeted by space characters Keys are always strings or identifiers.

For example:

{}
{"one":1 "two":2 "three":3}
{one: 1 two: 2 three: 3}
{
  one: 1
  two: 2
  three: 3
}

Tuple

Tuple represents n-tuples of values. Just like in python too, but without comma between values: values are separated by space characters. For example:

()
(1 2 3)
("one"
 "two"
 "three")

Named complex values

All named complex values has both expression based and statement based notation.

Node

Node is an analog of XML Element in XML Infoset model.

For example:

# compact expression form
color {r:64 g:32 b:16}
# formatted expression form
color {
    r: 64
    g: 32
    b: 16
}
# statement form
color
    r: 64
    g: 32
    b: 16