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Re: Quote of the day

• From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
• To: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Thu, 12 May 2022 12:10:34 +0100

Greetings,

On 12 May 2022, at 11:53, Roger L Costello wrote:

> "Yes, working with the XSD specification is a nightmare; it's the toughest spec I've ever had to work with other than Algol 68, and unlike Algol 68, some of the apparent formality turns out to be spurious; when it gets to tricky things that ought to be formal, like whether two types are identical, the spec bails out."

I remember reading the HyTime spec, and remember feeling a modest sense of achievement when I managed to work out what it was talking about, and realised that what it was talking about was not what it said it was talking about, and that the former was significantly more interesting than the latter.

Re specs: I think was the Scheme spec (a thing of beauty) that was remarked to be smaller than the _index_ to the Common Lisp spec (but I may have misremembered the pair of specs here, and it might be that this story was told of the XML spec and ISO-8879 (bringing this back on-topic)).^*

Best wishes,

Norman


* This is of course cruelly unfair, since CL was the original batteries-included language, and Scheme very much 'no batteries included, some self-assembly required'.  But, still...	


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Quote of the day
    • From: Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>

• References:
  • Quote of the day
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>