[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML-Data: advantages over DTD syntax? (and some wishes)
> From: Paul Prescod <papresco@t...> > Sean Mc Grath wrote: > > For me the big win is the simplification it could bring to base XML > > application development and the sheer intellectual appeal of it. > > It is a very computer science-ish, Lisp-ish, Dame Ada Lovelace-type, > > KISS way of looking at things. A grand unifying theory of a sort. One of the reasons LISP has failed is that it does only have one syntax, rather than a declaration syntax intertwined with a function syntax. (Of course, in LISP declarations such as they are functions or special forms that return values, so this is not to criticise, and LISPs usually are weakly typed or untyped.) C (and to a lesser extent C++), on the other hand, have different syntaxes for declarations and functions-- int a; and x = fopen(fp); are different syntaxes. There is no a=integer(); syntax. Even casting is a separate syntax. This difference in syntax is perhaps one of the reasons for the success of C over LISP. Of course, C++ allows member functions for a lot of these operations and brings them into the same syntax as other functions. But at the same time C++ also introduces different syntaxes for IO operations (i.e. >>) which I think seek to emphasize the structure of the text being IOed--in other words even in C++ the designers think that KISS is a goal rather than a principle. I do not like claims that some things are "computer science-ish" because computer science, on its own rationale, is an attempt to gain scientific understanding in the domain of computing. While these attempts will have cultural forms, it is a spurious claim to CS's authority for anyone to say a syntax is more "computer science-ish". Which is the most computer science-ish: Boolean logic, PROLOG, assembler, C, Eiffel or OmniMark? Computer scientists in universities tend to produce small elegant languages because that is all their modest budgets and limited problem domains allow. Rick Jelliffe xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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