Subject: Re: Language is not markup and markup is not language. From: Paul Prescod <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 17:37:18 -0500 |
"Vun Kannon, David" wrote: > > The point Paul raises below was the chief justification, I believe, in the > creation of PDF out of Postscript. Don't even get me started on Postscript...oops, too late. Beyond the halting problem Postscript demonstrates a huge sociological problem in programming languages used as 4GLs. It is extremely difficult to justify a new declarative feature because anything you need to do can be done "in code." This results in postscript files that are made up of 90% "function library" and 10% "data" because nobody ever sat down to convert the huge "function libraries" into built-in functions. This is another reason that I fought against the xsl:script element type. The xsl extension facility is, I think, the right level of separation to allow us to accurately guage what extensions people are using and what should go into the next version of the declarative syntax. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco And so, in one of history's little ironies, the global triumph of bad software in the age of the PC was reversed by a surprising combination of forces: the social transformation initiated by the network, a long-discarded European theory of political economy, and a small band of programmers throughout the world mobilized by a single simple idea. - http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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