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Re: RE: text, regular expressions

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: RE: text, regular expressions
• From: Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@e...>
• Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 22:00:45 -0500
• In-reply-to: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E430752B646@HQ5>
• Organization: OMS Development

7/9/02 9:39:22 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...> wrote:

>And how shall we know the good, Phaedrus?  A regular expression can locate a 
>statement, but without the context, what does it tell me?  I do not need to 
>open up and disect my watch to tell the time.   I need to tell my watch the 
>time and then trust it to remind me.  If time is a myth (what really happens 
>at the international dateline?), does my watch need to be told that?

I'm not sure what "time is a myth" really means, but I think it is important to remember that the 
assignment of numbers to stages of the Earth's rotation along its axis and its rotation around the 
sun is in fact a social construct, not the representation of some _a priori_ truth.  We create 
concepts like time zones and the IDL out of our desire that the mapping of numbers to astronomical 
phenomena be the same in all places; we don't want "1200" to mean sunrise in one place and sunset in 
another.  The way we represent time is an arbitrary convention, not an expression of physical laws.  
What matters is not how isomorphic it is to the "nature of the universe" but that people can agree on 
it.  Hmm, just like the success of XML is based not on its being an optimal encoding for data, but 
rather an encoding everyone can agree on.

• References:
  • RE: text, regular expressions
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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