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Re: Why XML?

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Why XML?
• From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 02:02:51 +0000
• In-reply-to: <16068.17304.410851.697539@m...>
• References: <OF1AE715F3.D4D85349-ONCA256D28.0001D5B4@f...> <16068.17304.410851.697539@m...>

David Megginson <david@m...> wrote:
| Matthew.Bennett@f... writes:

|> W3C has violated a first-order principle of language design; that
|> there should only be one way of doing something, such that everyone
|> ought to devise the 'same' program to solve the 'same' problem.

| It's clearly a principle rarely put into practice (I won't even start
| on the Common LISP looping constructions).

And even when the principle is put into practice, it can easily lead to
spectacularly bad application.  Speaking of Lisp, consider Scheme's
dismissal of iteration as unnecessary because recursion does the job, and
then the textbook chestnuts of how *not* to compute things like Fibonacci
numbers.  (Using accumulators to jigger recursion into tail call position
is a non-trivial "idiom".)

More generally, squeezing the last smidgins of non-orthogonality out of a
language are usually not worth either the design effort or the cognitive
load on users ("Okay, there's only one way to do this, but what the $#@%%
is it??")
    

• References:
  • Why XML?
    • From: Matthew.Bennett@f...
  • re: Why XML?
    • From: David Megginson <david@m...>

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