Re: Alternative syntaxes for the prolog

I think you're right that many programming languages do not identify
themselves, and most data files provide no information about their
format or contents.  In the same way, incunabula almost never have title
pages.

Is that a good reason to say that ixml grammars should not identify
themselves?  I guess you believe so.  

Nowadays, books do normally have title pages; I wonder why.  

Nowadays, image formats normally do contain metadata; I wonder why.

Michael

Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> writes:

> 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?
>> 


-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2024 14:58:18 UTC