Re: [PEPr] Comment on Tools and Utilities::Util_Checksum

Hi! First, I hope this mail doesn't appear twice. I had some problems with the list's automoderator. Martin Jansen wrote:

If the package can perform the generation of e.g. ISBN numbers, then the package name is misleading. Well, regarding the package name, I am not entirely sure, if that's the final and best one. I thought that together we could find a better name.

And we already have the Validate package that can be utilized for validation tasks. It would be great if your code made use of this. You're right. My package contains validation stuff and Validate even knows how to validate ISBN numbers etc.

Let me go back into history a bit. I needed a class to generate and validate license-numbers of german identity-cards. The license-number is generated using name-, birth- and license expiration-information. Validation is simpler and doesn't need any additional data. Soon I imagined more tasks that could be solved in the same way and so I decided to build the whole thing more generic using drivers, that do the generation/validation part and let a driver-baseclass do some basic checks on the given credential, so that I wouldn't be forced to do those checks in each driver again and again. The ISBN-number generation/validation is just another thing I implemented to have some example-drivers. For example someone could also use this framework to generate/validate serial numbers for non-free software (I guess no one would share his driver ;-)) based on a person's first- and lastname. In short words that means, that it just seemed useful to me to have both, generation and validation together in one class/driver together with a generic checking of required information. Regards, Carsten