I thought it was a good article too. My only beef is that the guy is
unhappy with XML as a tree representation because it "involves a lot of
typing".. :-)
ehehe... some of us can't read xml sans fontlock and proper indentation like
it's well-written english ;-)
perhaps he should be using the xml mode on a real ide...
It's pretty much trivial to xform between sexp & XML in comparison to say..
xforming between C/java and either sexp/XML. Concept of attributes would
be a little messy I guess, but a lot of people don't like those for very
reasonable reasons anyways. Namespaces are pretty directly transportable
too.
one thing the sexp people always seem to omit when dissing on xml is that
everything in lisp has a "type" and that many things even have slots,
packages, etc. etc. so its not like all sexp's have this perfect symmetry
on the other hand, real lispers stopped storing data in lists that later
need to destructured, eg
(todo "housework"
(item (priority high) "clean the house."))
decades ago (well... let's ignore emacs lisp ;-) so some of these expamles
of how sexps are better are kind of flaky...
the best xml -> lisp conversion I've seen dynamically declares classes based
on the DTD then converts the xml to clos objects with a sax parser
The software I'm working on these days has probably 4-5 XML 'languages'....
if there was a good sexp <--> XML both-way conversion standard which had an
implementation I could play with, it might make our environment a little
friendlier for people who either like the sexp syntax, or hate 'lots of
typing'. :-)
your subject your users to an xml front end? ;-) or are you talking about
your own programers?
what about a visual leaning that made it seem like neither?
http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html
http://lemonodor.com/archives/001207.html
:-)
Nick
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