RE: attribute order (RE: Syntax Sugar and XML information models)

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>]

> There is an interesting article at Rational's
> site, based on a large SW development on which there had been lots of
> measurements taken, that ADA was about twice as easy to maintain 
> as C.  

...and about twice as hard to write. The compilers were very strict
and way back when *slow*. I remember going and havign a cup of tea
while I waited for a smallish module to compile...


> So SGML seems to have adopted named arguments, like command-line 
> interfaces and ADA and Common LISP, as part of best-practise 
> sofware engineering as seen in the early 1980s.  

I think that for loosely typed languages, this is sensible...
if you have a look at XEXPR, it shows the unification by allowing
attributes to be treated as named parameters, to functions.

FWIW. I have come to believe that XML is really all about loose
typing and "derivation by extension", where the type is really 
determined by the structure of the data, rather than by type
graphs based upon type identifiers (as found in JAVA et al.).

This is why I see type as something you project onto an XML
instance: you can test to see if it conforms to a type, and
thereby declare that it is/is not of that type, but the data
is not intrinsically of *any* type. This unifies "implements",
"extends", "is-a" and "has-a".

In such a world, unordered parameter lists/attribute lists
make a great deal of sense...