Moin Matthew Danish, > I cooked up a quick example for you... see the 3 attached files.
nice idea. And it shows that LISP syntax is as fine to represent hirachical data as are XML and SGML syntax. LISP, in this case, is only syntax and free of semantics. This is similar to XML & SGML and a difference to LaTeX, roff or HTML. Semantics is a different can of worms. Its provided by document type definitions like QWERTZ, LinuxDoc, DocBook, DebianDoc or XML-Edifact. The third leg is processing. Your example showed that you have a kind of processing to map LISP to DebianDoc. And here markup languages show abstraction. You can process SGML or XML into many other formats using nearly any language you want. And at this point XML and SAX or SGML and Amsterdam SGML Parser are superior to your LISP example. Your LISP code has to parsed into memory, and shares the same drawback as XML/DOM or most XSLT processors, if you think about EDI documents in megabyte size. My point here is that SGML and XML are only syntax and abstract to semantics or processing. This is a feature, imho, as it allows to chose best fit semantics and best fit processing for your type of documents. Other document formats like HTML, LaTeX, roff are bound to their sememantics and to a single tool to process them. So SGML or XML are good for any kind of hirachical data and can be processed into many formats using many differenct programming languages and design patterns. Bye Michael -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] UNA:+.? 'CED+2+:::Linux:2.2.18'UNZ+1' http://www.xml-edifact.org/ CETERUM CENSEO WINDOWS ESSE DELENDAM
