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>> This was covered in TFA Not exactly... he basically said "let's drop the current spec and use lisp". The thing I noticed when looking at language design th
by lhorie 16y ago
>> This was covered in TFA
Not exactly... he basically said "let's drop the current spec and use lisp".
The thing I noticed when looking at language design though is that it's really easy to say "language X should look like Y" but overlook something that makes the whole proposal a really bad idea. Case in point: can you spot the problems on his lisp example? (hint: elements vs text nodes, required escape sequences)
- jacobolus 16y agoWell, okay. What I meant was that your criticism implied that he didn’t understand/address implicit tags, while he clearly actually did, but just suggested they be dropped. I also hope his examples were more like a sketch than a careful proposal – otherwise, as you said, there’s a lot of ambiguity. Anyway, there are clear advantages and disadvantages to both models. I’m not personally convinced that either HTML or S-expressions is an especially good document format, at least not as far as a human trying to create a document is concerned, but fortunately these kinds of languages are easy enough to generate that the original source language can pretty much look like whatever someone can imagine.