Re: A7: CDATA, RCDATA, TEMP marked sections?

> To be realistic, what about C++?
> 
> It has 3 forms comment delimiters:
> 	//  from C++
> 	# (at start of line) for cpp
> 	/* */ for 

# does not introduce a comment in C++ (nor in the cpp).
It is used for directives that are handled separately -- e.g.
#include <identifier>

There are few people who would say that C++ has a clean syntax, and even
its designer, Bjarne Stroustrop, is not among them -- see his book
The Design and Rationale of C++ (is that the right title?) for comments
about why C++ is the way it is.  Mostly it's backwards compatibility,
which is so often why unpleasant designs get perpetuated.  Vide MS-DOS...

The people who worked on C++ were/ae some of the best in the programming
language industry -- just as the people who worked on SGML were/are some
of the best in the text processing industry.

C++ has been successful because it builds on something insanely successful,
and makes it more powerful -- at the cost of greatly increaased complexity.
It has succeeded where none of the Pascal++ could.  It is not in fact
100% compatible with C.  But the incompatibilities are clearly documented
and understood, and it looks close enough to C's popular syntax that C
programmers are prepared to invest time and effort learning it.

Sometimes when you give up compatibility, the world loses interest --
SmallTalk 80 was a fabulous language.  NeWS was technically the best
windowing system ever created.

It's not clear to what extent XML has to be backwards-compatible with
SGML, and in what ways, in order to succeed, and I am trying to probe
that boundary.  For example, it seems to have been agreeed that there
will be application conventions that an SGML system wouldn't know about,
and clearly if you have no DTD, most SGML systems are hosed.

Lee

Received on Friday, 11 October 1996 12:38:19 UTC