[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Names As Types
On 8/30/05, Nathan Young <natyoung@c...> wrote: > Hi. > > I may well have bent the conversation into a tangent. I admit that by now > I'm totally confused by the turtle metaphor. First, it's a reference to an old joke - "bigname scientist was giving a lecture on astronomy. After the lecture, an elderly lady came up and told the scientist that he had it all wrong. 'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist asked "And what is the turtle standing on?" To which the lady triumphantly replied: "You're very clever, young man, but it's no use -- it's turtles all the way down."" [That particular version is at http://members.tripod.com/TheoLarch/turtle.html] The point is that there's no "bottom of the XML stack" at which you can authoritatively say what an element or attribute name or value refers to in the real world. Rather, one can only talk about the upper layers of "turtles" [specs, bits of code, well-defined concepts, whatever] that are understood in a particular context. I'm not sure if this is Platonic or not. To switch metaphors, XML labels are the shadows on the cave wall, and say nothing about the source of the illumination or the reality of the body casting the shadow. Finally, one should understand the xml-dev in general and Len and I in particular love to beat what we think of as clever metaphors into a bloody whimpering pulp, so don't worry too much if it doesn't make sense to you. It might not make any sense at all :-)
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