From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] UN to fund linux for the 3rd world From: Charles Forsyth Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 20:53:07 +0100 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Topicbox-Message-UUID: dddc89ea-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 >>Interestingly enough, a number of projects that were XML-based are now=20 >>S-expression based, so I guess it works for them too.=20 several of us have used non-xml syntax (eg, Xduce) even when one of the possible physical representations might be xml. the scanner is tiny, the syntax can be used directly in a programming language withou= t itching or retching, and what matters is the underlying abstraction anywa= y. xml provides (slightly weird) trees; s-expressions are trees not lists. all of the non-xml forms i know seem to be clear cut about whether a character is or is not part of a string. i like the precision, myself. >>adoption of XML-based techniques. One has now powerful and uniform >>tools to operate on the tree model =E2=80=94 much more powerful than Li= sp >>offers for lists =E2=80=94 and completely automated serialization and p= arsing i'm fairly sure s-expressions are in fact trees, not lists. in practice, lisp programs have operated on tree structures as long as i = can remember, and in fact, given the code is data approach of some lisp programs, including lisp compilers, that's surely just the point. the power comes from tree operations, not the syntax of the tree representation (but see below). many forms of powerful tree processing, including tree automata, were done long before xml or even sgml came along. in fact, when xml came along, i applied tree automata techniques i'd used years before to try to get a handle on it (as did many others). it would be fair to say that xml's providing a dtd was an advance. (it was SGML really, but by eliminating `&' XML eliminated a real nuisance.) fortunately, that helpful step was subseque= ntly itself eliminated by inventing Xschema, so i don't need to be all that fa= ir! as a nod towards joining the two camps, there was a pleasant article in Dr Dobbs in March, that purported in the title to be about `fostering = little languages' but was really a cunningly disguised way of getting people to stop using XML directly (let alone XSLT) and start using lisp and s-expression= s. they didn't mention Plan 9, but then again, neither have we.