- From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2012 11:22:54 -0400
- To: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>
- Cc: liam@w3.org, public-microxml@w3.org
James Clark scripsit:
> So, with this approach, they're basically comments, which raises the
> question: why do we need two syntaxes for comments?
The generic answer is that we need to be able to distinguish between
comments addressed to humans and comments addressed to machines, because
machines are foolish and can't tell the difference on their own. This
distinction goes back to at least Algol 68, the first language (AFAIK)
to introduce the term "pragma" (in the variant form "pragmat").
Once we accept that they're both comments, it's not that big a deal
to accept both comment syntax and PI syntax; the PI syntax has the
advantage of saying clearly just which (abstract) machine should be
interested.
--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
--Nicholas van Rijn
John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2012 15:23:20 UTC