Re: More on RE/RS

At 12:52 PM 9/27/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:
>I think a lot of the RS/RE trouble comes from confusion between the
>representation and that which is represented.  Some people (many people)
>want to be able to say
>    this is
>    a monospaced    example
>    and the columns line up.
>
>and have spaces, tabs and newlines be significant in the markup in order
>to represent that in a ``WYSIWYG'' way.  Then people with no background
>in design can try and lay out their source code or DTDs and align unrelated
>things at the expense of clarity :-), and neither the receiving application
>nor the screen or paper layout designer can correct the errors without
>extensive hand work, it's awful.

At first, I was going to say that this was a poor example and suggest
that you considered most of the programming reference books on your
shelves, but then I realized that it isn't so bad. The only difference
is that I think you're assuming that someone typed your example. We have
hundreds (thousands?) of tabular ASCII report options in various
software products. The documentation for that software naturally contains
samples of those reports. I just can't picture myself promoting a
language that requires people to go in and add markup to these examples.
I don't think I could even convince myself to use such a language.

bob

Robert Streich				streich@slb.com
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