On Wednesday 23 July 2008 15:20:59 Steve Litt wrote: > When the discussion reverts to "your thingamabob is from another > decade/century so it must not be good by today's standards", you know that > thingamabob is pretty darn good, or else there would have been a more > powerful argument against it.
Pavel is a developer just as I am. In this thread we been teasing each other over this issue. In such cases this is an acceptable argument (IMO). ;-) > First of all, I understand *exactly* why an XML native format is an > improvement for the LyX application. I'm limiting my point to the concept > that something old has to be something bad. That is fair. :-) > Modern things are usually improvements, but often are not improvements in > quality or usefulness. They can be improvements to profit margin (e.g. most > MS Windows "improvements"), or marketing improvements (all the silly little > expensive features thrown into basic family cars today), or improvements in > restricting use (DRM), or improvements in price (crummy bicycles from > Walmart). Sometimes older stuff has more quality or usefulness. All that is true but in this case the lyx file format and indirectly the lyx parser have not been changed in a long time until 2002 not because they were perfect but because most developers were afraid to touch and break it. The format had been evolving over time and it was a mess with places where whitespaces were significant and others were they were for no good reason. > In 1969 and the early 1970's, Ken Thompson and the gang made Unix with the > philosophy of little executables that do one thing and do it right. Stdin, > stdout and pipes were the glue language with which these little executables > could be cascaded to produce a substantial result. This enabled > logical-thinking non-developers, and also developers, to produce those > substantial results in an hour, with perhaps the greatest encapsulation > that's ever been achieved in the computer world. Each little executable has > one input and one output, each being a measurable test point. For batch > processes this "programming" technique is every bit as productive as it was > 39 years ago. lyx2lyx that lyx uses to convert between the different file formats works using this principle, it acts as a filter receiving from stdin and writing the transformation in stdout. Yet until now there is not a good way to have an external program (script) other than lyx to check the validity of a lyx file. For me, at least, this is a strong shortcoming of our file format. > There may be things wrong with awking, seding and perling data into > submission, but the age of these tools is not one of them. If you add there the coreutils, like tail, cut, paste, merge and so on we can do things that spreadsheet programs can only dream of like processing Gigs of data with thousands of lines and columns. :-) > SteveT -- José Abílio
