- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 01:02:01 -0400
- To: lee@sq.com
- CC: dgd@cs.bu.edu, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
>Yeah, it would be too useful :-) But the way things are going, XML isn't >going to be used very widely anyway. It's accumulating too many of the >things that, in practice, have made SGML unpopular with those people whose >favour we now seek to curry. Or so it seems to me. Hmm. I tend to agree... >Imagine if the Unix C compiler output its parse tree in SGML, and so did >the Pascal compiler, sharing the same code generation algorithm. Imagine >if they output SGML to the assembler, so that you could insert an >SGML-based code optimiser. Imagine if you could use the SGML-awk to write >a little peephole optimiser (in the sense of Thomson & Ritchie). >Or monitor the stream going through the compiler to generate a >cross-reference code listing. > >What if database schemas were written in SGML? Spreadsheets? I imagined, and I saw LISP.... but you are right, these are all things that SGML *could* be useful for, or perhaps *should* be useful for, and it shouldn't take 40,000+ lines of code to write a validating parser for it.
Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 01:04:18 UTC