Re: Alternative syntaxes for the prolog

You can always supply metadata in comments.

Steven

On Tuesday 05 March 2024 15:51:12 (+01:00), C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

 > 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?
 > >> 
 > 
 >

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2024 14:59:45 UTC