My own $0.02, as another software developer and an old Lisp hacker myself (and of course, everything I say here is purely personal opinion).
TY> I think this can be done with a programming language. Yup, you can exchange programs as your "model description", and people did essentially that for a few decades. (They still do even today, especially when the model is, e.g., MATLAB code.) There are at least two reasons why people are trying to move away from that: 1) The system interpreting the description must implement the entire programming language interpreter. Little b, for example, needs Lisp underneath it. But regardless of whether your description requires Lisp or not, it's a nontrivial requirement. It reduces your ability to share the model on the one hand, and the size of your willing audience on the other. 2) The essence of what you're trying to model becomes lost. It is no longer a description of the domain phenomena (here, biological mechanisms), and instead becomes tied up with artifacts of the simulation/analysis framework. (I'm sorry if that seems obvious and I'm missing your point!) TY> XML based languages have other types of advantages TY> over lisp-based languages, naming the great number of TY> tools able to interpret XML files, interoperability TY> with XML/RDF for a variety of metadata capabilities, TY> and many more. I'm not sure if you're saying this, but just to be clear, XML is *not* a programming language. It's merely a serialization format. One could use ASN.1, or Google's Protocol Buffers, or any of another of others. MH _______________________________________________ cellml-discussion mailing list cellml-discussion@cellml.org http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion
