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Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML

• To: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
• From: Henry Luo <henryluo@v...>
• Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:42:52 +0800
• Cc: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@i...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <434D1AD9.3090607@m...>
• References: <434CFDE6.5070707@v...> <f5boe5uopc1.fsf@e...> <434D171C.8090708@v...> <434D1AD9.3090607@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317)

XML is already given. And we cannot change it to make it a strong typed 
markup language.
However, is it better for an markup language to be strong typed if 
invented from scratch?

We may want to look at the history of high level programming languages. 
The early languages like Fortran and Basic were not strong-typed. But as 
C come out to be strong-typed, people realize the benefits, it helps 
avoid mistakes in the code.

So does a strong-typed markup like Candle lose anything comparing to 
XML? Is it less extensible or flexible in anyway?
You are invited to give comments.

The fundamental concept behind Candle type system is that all values in 
the markup are strong-typed to be one of the pre-defined types. It is 
impossible to define all possible types people want and give each an 
unique syntax, so Candle's syntax hinting is only provided for a set of 
predefined types. And Candle type system has been designed to be a 
closed type system, that is any Candle expression on any Candle 
pre-defined types results in some pre-defined type in Candle. So that we 
don't have to invent new syntax everyday. Schema can then be used to 
extend or constrain on the pre-defined type and thus Candle should be as 
extensible as XML.

This is like in C, you can define your struct and union as complicated 
as you like, but the primitive types in the language are just that many.

Henry

Elliotte Harold wrote:

> "XML is only semi-structured with no explicit type information." is a 
> feature, not a bug. Removing it makes the data less useful, and the 
> format fairly uninteresting. XML would not be where it is today if it 
> featured strong data typing.
>

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
  • Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

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  • Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
    • From: ht@i... (Henry S. Thompson)
  • Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
    • From: Henry Luo <henryluo@v...>
  • Re: [ANN] Candle 0.8 - a new scripting language for XML
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

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