[Openmcl-devel] ccl manual (was Re: trace on recursive functions)

[Ron Garret]

On Dec 11, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Philippe Sismondi wrote:

> 
> On 2009-12-11, at 8:54 PM, Steve Núñez wrote:
> 
>> Gentlemen,
>> 
>> I must have missed the start of this (well, glossed over it hoping  
>> it was a
>> brief thread).
>> 
>> I can't help but think that going from DocBooks nicely ordered and
>> semantically correct format to something else is anything but a step
>> backward.
>> 
>> We use docbook for a lot, and it certainly can be a PITA, but it's  
>> better
>> than any alternatives when you weigh everything up.
>> 
>> A good XML editor can make this job much, much easier.
>> 
>>   - Steve
>> 
>> 
> 
> <snip...>
> 
> At the risk of wearing this topic out:
> 
> The debate arises because there is a hard-to-resolve conflict between  
> (a) ease of authoring and (b) structure, uniformity, transforming to  
> multiple output formats, etc.
> 
> IMHO the best format for creating content that may be transformed to  
> other formats is XML, whether docbook or DITA or similar. It is easy  
> to transform to html, latex, XSL-FO and then pdf, etc. Knowledge of  
> XSLT, plus XSL-FO or latex is essential to make this work.

I can't stand it any more.

(with-unapologitic-snarkiness

«
There's a technology called S-expressions you might want to look into.  S-expressions are kind of like XML, but with a much saner syntax.  You don't have to manually match up your end tags, which makes S-expressions much easier to compose and to read than XML.  There are a lot of tools for manipulating S-expressions, including an editor called Emacs, and another one called Hemlock.  It is borderline trivial to transform S-expressions into XML, or any other format you like.  S-expressions have even been used as the base syntax for a full-featured programming language called Lisp.  If you haven't looked at it you really should.  It's quite nifty.
»

)

rg