Re: ACM

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> By most computer-sciency-type definitions of "Programming Language" - 
> XML would qualify. It does have a means of describing how data is to be 
> organized and manipulated. Especially if one is really thinking of XML 
> in the larger sense of including style sheets and such.

Sure, if you think of XML as the set of all XML-based languages. XSLT 
for example can be used as a programming language. I was thinking of XML 
itself. I would actually say that despite its name, the Extensible 
Markup Language isn't even a language. It's a common syntax for markup 
languages.

I really don't see how XML in itself has "a means of describing how data 
is to be organized and manipulated". It does provide a means of 
organizing data in a tree structure. To describe *how* data may be 
organized you can use XML Schema Language - an XML-based language for 
defining XML-based languages. To describe how the data is to be 
manipulated you can use XSLT - another XML-based language - and to 
describe how it should be presented you might use XSL-FO - also an 
XML-based language.

> A word processor that can remember keystrokes and replay them is a kind 
> of "programming language", isn't it? ;-)

If you mean that it records macros, then it is at least a programming 
tool. If it's displaying a document that you describe as replaying 
keystrokes, then you have just defined ASCII to be a programming 
language. Then the term becomes meaningless because literally everything 
computerish becomes a programming language.

-- 
Björn Persson

jor ers @sv ge.
b n_p son eri nu