From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 25453 invoked by uid 1002); 4 May 2003 20:25:47 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 2570 invoked from network); 4 May 2003 20:25:46 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Evan Powers To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 16:25:35 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.4.3 References: <1052064144.1708.3.camel@cyr.kaylix.net> <20030504164928.GN5148@lucien.dreaming> In-Reply-To: <20030504164928.GN5148@lucien.dreaming> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <200305041625.35794.powers.161@osu.edu> Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Init replacement X-Archives-Salt: 96ecc545-fce5-4613-8a64-64d317aabe35 X-Archives-Hash: 0ad363dfd68523e29c927e37569abb08 On Sunday 04 May 2003 12:49 pm, Bj=F6rn Lindstr=F6m wrote: > SGML (and thus HTML) was never originally intended to be human > readable/hackable. The same goes for XML. It is designed to be > easily _parsed_, not easily _read_. I think you've made an excellent point here, one people should not quickl= y=20 overlook. Though I'll take a slightly different perspective. XML isn't intrinsically harder to read than any other general-purpose=20 expressive system. When humans say that it is, what they're really doing = is=20 complaining that they cannot use domain-specific sub-syntaxes. (Or rather= ,=20 that they are discouraged from doing so.) Example. Mathematical notation isn't /necessary/, people could just write= "a=20 quantity named y equals the indefinite integral of f, a function of a=20 quantity named x, times the derivative of the quantity x". But they never= do,=20 instead preferring to write "y=3D", a certain squiggle, and "f(x)dx". Does anyone actually think a human is ever going to (voluntarily) write a= n=20 equation of even moderate complexity in MathML? My point is this: Starting and stopping most services is a task that can be broken down int= o=20 execing or fork-execing another program with a particular environment,=20 particular command line arguments, and particular input and output=20 redirections. Shell is a domain-specific language particularly suited to=20 expressing these operations. I won't say that XML has no place, or that script snippets shouldn't be=20 embedded within an XML document, or that the script a human writes should= n't=20 be immediately translated into its XML equivalent. I am saying, however, = that=20 humans will insist on writing in the shell domain-specific language where= it=20 is more convenient for them to do so, and that forcing them to do otherwi= se=20 in the name of anything is a long-term design mistake. Which I suppose is a quite strong statement to make after all. Evan -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list