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
