Re: Advantage of XML based GUI? (was Re: Ada-inspired OS/Language)

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote:
: you still boil
: down to conventions and data format.

Sure, and in a sense, an Ada program is just a string
that is in accordance with some grammar, that is
acceepted by some machinery. :-) That is, all this gossip
about the safe programming language Ada boils down
to accepted/not accepted, right?

Besides, is there a convention based data format similar
to XML based formats that provides for builtin referential
integrity (like via IDREF?)? One that has well defined
inclusion and reuse mechanisms? One that allows renaming
of values?

I'm not convinced that calling a BNF like thing (and more)
mere convention is really appropriate.

: Beyond that, you are just talking about tools that
: work with XML.

Well, yes and no (certainly no, actually).  There is a notion
of a conforming XML system, and you can't just specify document
types or even be done with wellformedness and then use, say
pattern based text extraction and say, "we are doing XML based
data processing". At least you'll be missing something then :-)

As a side note, why are these standard lectures called
"algorithms _and_ data structures"? There is even data
driven programming, so a decent data format, and means
of securely specifying it, is crucial, I think.

I'll concede that XML text doesn't look pretty or elegant, but
text with XML markup in it is really useful, for example
when debugging data streams, due to being explicit.
Isn't that something that Ada programmers usually prefer?

-- Georg