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

[Waldek Hebisch]

Ron Garret wrote:
> I am certainly no fan of reinventing the wheel for the sake of reinventing the wheel.  But markup is a special case, for two reasons.  First, SGML/XML/HTML *are* S-expressions, only with a more cumbersome syntax.  There is a formal equivalence between:
> 
> <foo>...</foo>
> 
> and
> 
> (foo ...)
> 
> So it's trivial to go back and forth between the two.
> 
> But there is one thing that everyone here should be able to agree on and that is that S-expressions are cool.  That, plus the fact that there is a good impedance match here, to me means that this is as good a problem as any to collectively tackle.  If not this, then what?
> 

I think you forget basic fact: XML is ugly _bacause_ it was designed
to be a markup language.  Being a markup language language means
that "ordinary text" goes unquated, but the extras are more heavy.
Normal Lisp reader requires too much quotes for ordinary text.
If modify reader to treat parenthesis, comma and colon as text
characters then you will end up with a variation of XML.  While
using lighweight variant of XML makes sense you end up rewirting
software and retraing people.  Both have nontrivial costs.

BTW: Sorry, given such a nice flame war I could not resist to
take part...
-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
hebisch at math.uni.wroc.pl