[RLUG] The Nature of Lisp

[n a]

>I thought it was a good article too.  My only beef is that the guy is 
>unhappy with XML as a tree representation because it "involves a lot of 
>typing".. :-)

ehehe... some of us can't read xml sans fontlock and proper indentation like 
it's well-written english ;-)

perhaps he should be using the xml mode on a real ide...

>It's pretty much trivial to xform between sexp & XML in comparison to say.. 
>xforming between C/java and either sexp/XML.  Concept of attributes would 
>be a little messy I guess, but a lot of people don't like those for very 
>reasonable reasons anyways.  Namespaces are pretty directly transportable 
>too.

one thing the sexp people always seem to omit when dissing on xml is that 
everything in lisp has a "type" and that many things even have slots, 
packages, etc. etc. so its not like all sexp's have this perfect symmetry

on the other hand, real lispers stopped storing data in lists that later 
need to destructured, eg

  (todo "housework"
      (item (priority high) "clean the house."))

decades ago (well... let's ignore emacs lisp ;-) so some of these expamles 
of how sexps are better are kind of flaky...

the best xml -> lisp conversion I've seen dynamically declares classes based 
on the DTD then converts the xml to clos objects with a sax parser

>
>The software I'm working on these days has probably 4-5 XML 'languages'.... 
>if there was a good sexp <--> XML both-way conversion standard which had an 
>implementation I could play with, it might make our environment a little 
>friendlier for people who either like the sexp syntax, or hate 'lots of 
>typing'. :-)

your subject your users to an xml front end? ;-) or are you talking about 
your own programers?

what about a visual leaning that made it seem like neither?

    http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html
    http://lemonodor.com/archives/001207.html

:-)

Nick

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