17 May
2004
17 May
'04
7:03 a.m.
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 10:36:27 +0200, Alfons Adriaensen wrote:
Seriously now, having to choose between LISP or XML,
I'd be 100%
on the LISP side. For those who really want XML, it should be
possible to come up with a LISP function that will just generate
it from the LISP description - the inverse seems to be a bit
more difficult.
I have to assume you're joking here ;)
Even if you just mean s-expressions, theres a reason why they flopped as a
data format - their really hard to prettyprint and really hard to read if
their not prettprinted. XML has been described as s-expressions with names
attributes - and thats exactly what it is (give or take), but naming the
attributes is important for human readability.
In any case, the syntax is only a part of any metadata language, the
semantics and guaranteeing extensibility are the hard part.
Guaranteeing extensibility with a naive XML Schema is hard, guaranteeing
it with an agreed s-expression syntax is almost impossible.
- Steve