[REBOL] Re: designing dialects - was OWL
From: robbo1mark::aol::com at: 22-Mar-2002 6:09
Robert,
Surely the ideal scenario is where it doesn't matter whether the reader is human or a
machine and that the
information that is encoded within the dialect is programming language neutral, that
way nobody get's upset , anybody can read / translate / emit whatever is appropriate
AND the dialect alnguage reflects the context and terminology of the specific field of
interest.
And seeing as humans design and implement all of these things in first place why not
lean towards the human side of understand though not at the expense of gross machine
inefficiencies.
print bold text "Hello World"
could be an example from a page formatting dialect but is equally readable to humans
AND machine programming languages.
It is NOT REBOL but it is extremely REBOL friendly, however parsing from perl, python,
lisp or whatever language shouldn't be too difficult.
It is also more efficient encoding than the XML type markup languages, properly fefined
you can achieve the same structures and relationships between data / code & information.
I agree that in a text editor you would like to type
*Hello world* to achieve the same effect but that is an ergonomic consideration and not
how to achieve the most
the most expressively understandable DIALECTING and ONTOLOGY language which is neutral
to whether the reader is machine or human, REBOL or not REBOL.
*Hello World* => BOLD TEXT "Hello World"
it would be good if BOLD TEXT "Hello World" => HTML
wasn't necessarily the case but until we can persuade the world to ditch XML / HTML then
I suppose it's all
academic.
cheers,
Mark Dickson
in favour of something more human centric
In a message dated Fri, 22 Mar 2002 5:48:59 AM Eastern Standard Time, "Robert M. Muench"
<[robert--muench--robertmuench--de]> writes:
