[boulder.pm] Hmm, now this is either the most boring list ever,or it's broken :)

[Luke Palmer]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Rob Nagler wrote:

> svq writes:
> > Maybe some good perl discussion will ensue after this?
> 
> I have been thinking about Perl and little languages lately.  There
> has been a variety of discussions, e.g., rpm-list at redhat.com, about
> using XML for little languages.  To my mind XML is an inappropriate
> solution if you don't need heterogeneous data exchange. 

Agreed. I don't like XML much at all, actually. I was never much of an *ML 
fan; I've preferred LaTeX for typesetting, whatever for data exchange 
(mostly some convoluted protocol), et cetera.

> If you are
> using Perl, Data::Dumper/do/eval is the right solution for all little
> language problems.

Well, apparently people like Scheme.  Hey, I figure it's easy to parse and 
it's easy to write (except for when you need to *do* something, NPI), so 
why not.  Perl, even if it's just simple stuff, is not easy to parse (you 
need something as complex as Perl to do it), so if you're writing in 
non-Perl (but why?), you're screwed (I'm even getting irritated by all 
this stuff (parenthetical expressions, that is (sorry (this is 
starting to look like Scheme :)))).

Has anyone else heard of alternatives to XML and Scheme that are 
tolerable?  Any of these that there is not a CPAN mod for yet (I need to 
contribute something... anything).

> Nothing like a bold statement to get the conversation going, eh?

Eh indeed.

Luke