begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 04:32:53PM -0800: > > On Sun, February 4, 2007 3:57 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > Yea. Nesting elements of the same name defeats the benefits XML has over > Lisp. Tell the author of that XML language that is pretty silly.
Legacy product. Specification is past the point of meaningful change. :( [snip] > > ...or go back to S-Expressions. > > Hey if you like S-expressions better that's ok. Oh, I don't know if I *like* 'em. What I *like* is key-value pairs, but that only works 90% of the time. > Should people have to use > aforementioned tools to fix i[n]dentation and match up parens or would it be > better to just add proper indentation to the spec and not let any XML > validate unless indentation is done right? I'd go with the former. > What's wrong with that? What's the problem with COBOL requiring indentation? Or ForTran? Or Makefiles? I've heard a LOT of complaining over the years about those things; Ant was written, in part, because the developers liked XML and hated the Makefile required indentation trick. > All that is is basically "Python with parens". Or braces. Python Needs Braces. :) > Since there is no good reason to *allow* improper indentation why not > *mandate* it then? Who says there's no good reason to allow improper indentation? Most of the time, there's no good reason, but that's not saying that there is *never* a good reason. Personally, when I'm "trying something out", I'll slap it all the way over to column 0, so that it's easy to see what's new; if it doesn't work, it's far easier to identify and remove the new stuff, or to find it to debug. This works for both code and for indented data files. Indentation is a form of documentation. > (I'm personally glad my transmission doesn't let me > put the car in reverse gear while on the freeway at 65mph but that's me.) Are you in the habit of trying to shift into reverse gear while driving down the highway at 65mph? I'd be very unhappy with a transmission that didn't let me shift into reverse if I were on the highway. It's not the thing you *normally* do, but when you need to, it's vitally important that you be able to. -- Never have accidently tried for reverse on the highway. Don't quite see the need to be protected against something I'm not likely to attempt. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
