Re: A programming language is...

From: Karl A. Krueger (kkrueger_at_example.edu)
Date: 08/19/04 

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 03:08:34 +0000 (UTC)

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> William Bland <news456@abstractnonsense.com> writes:
>>Isn't this a similar fallacy to the one people slip into when they believe
>>that representing their data using xml will magically enable any program
>>to read, write, and understand it?
>
> There are different grades of understanding. XML has more
> machine-understandable structure than plain text, but less
> than an XML-application.

Plain text has plenty of machine-understandable structure. It can be
treated as a sequence of characters, lines, tokens, or records of
fields. It is so remarkably flexible that all kinds of other structures
can be written using it -- including CSV, S-expressions, and XML. The
"understanding" in every case is in the application (or library), not in
the format itself.

An XML parser can only cope with a small fraction of files written in
the powerful language of Plain Text. :) 

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger@example.edu>
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Email address is spamtrapped.  s/example/whoi/
"Outlook not so good." -- Magic 8-Ball Software Reviews

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