[geeks] Sneaking around keyword itis

[Dave McGuire]

On Monday, November 25, 2002, at 09:16 PM, Jonathan C Patschke wrote:
>> So, XML is hot.  Everything this and everything that must be XML.  XML
>> is even being used for programming languages.
>
> For $deity only knows what reason.  XML is, for all practical 
> purposes, wordy Scheme with potentially significant whitespace.  It's 
> great for storing irregularly structured data, but I still don't see 
> how/why it's going to be the saving grace of IT/CS.

   Well I've been wondering the myself, off and on, but I just came 
across an excellent example.  The QYXie system can deal with tests & 
quizzes...and we'll need to import them (questions, answers, answer 
choices, and hints) from other educational content providers.  With 
XML, we just send them a DTD and say "give them to us like this"...and 
with about a dozen lines of code, bang...it's there.

   Sure, there are other ways to do this, and this is nothing 
new...hell, I've done exactly this dozens upon dozens of times in the 
past...but *never* has it been this easy and this platform-independant. 
  Never.  I am really impressed.

>> So, what did one guy do?  He took his favorite programming language 
>> and
>> swapped the ('s and )'s for <'s and >'s.  Voila 
>> http://www.waterlang.org
>
>   "Water".<key_of <char "t"/> /> ?
>   <vector 5 10 99/>.<last/> ?
>   "Mike|Plusch|28840".<to_object maker=person separator="|"/> ???
>
> What is this the -only- person in the world who decided that PHP is 
> too consistent and beautiful and that PERL is too readable?  And this 
> is "Simplified XML programming for the web", hm?  Blargh.  What 
> happened to simple meaning simple?

   Yes...This "water" language is a completely different story.  
Complete and utter bullshit, in my opinion.  Not that anyone asked, but 
hell, it's me so I'm gonna say so anyway! ;)

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                 "You don't have Vaseline in Canada?"
St. Petersburg, FL                     -Bill Bradford