Re: Alternative syntaxes for the prolog

I was trying to think of which languages felt it necessary to declare which 
they were.

FORTRAN doesn't, the Algols don't, Pascal doesn't, C doesn't, Python 
doesn't, in fact, barely a single programming language does. 
HTML does, but for a different reason. XML does sometimes. JSON doesn't. 
Shell languages do occasionally but for a different reason. Or at least a 
functional reason.
make doesn't, CSS doesn't.

At first look it doesn't seem like many computer languages feel the need to 
mention their name.

Steven

On Monday 04 March 2024 20:13:50 (+01:00), C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

 > 
 > Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> writes:
 > 
 > > ...
 > >
 > > ... any other character [other than namestart, comment start, and
 > > whitespace] is available to signal the start of a prolog.
 > >
 > > ...
 > >
 > > but there is no functional reason for the "ixml", so better:
 > >
 > > [version "1.1"]
 > > (version "1.1")
 > > <version "1.1">
 > 
 > The observation that there is no functional reason for labeling ixml
 > grammars with the string "ixml" makes me think.
 > 
 > I wonder how you feel about title pages in books.  Waste of paper,
 > aren't they?  Books got along just fine without title pages or tables of
 > contents or running heads or page numbers for hundreds and hundreds of
 > years.  If anyone wants to know when a book was published, or who wrote
 > it, or what its title is, then surely the library card catalog will tell
 > them.  And what's more, there only has to be one record in the catalog,
 > not one for every copy of the book.  So we can avoid the tedious
 > situation in which every single copy of the book has to carry the same
 > information, at a massive cost in redundancy.
 > 
 > The same holds true, I think, for ixml files.  After all, if a user
 > didn't already know that a file contained an invisible-XML grammar, why
 > would they be looking at the file?
 >

Received on Monday, 4 March 2024 23:51:46 UTC