Re: Type and Structure Re: ASN.1 and XML

[Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>]

> > Yes, and I don't see how this contradicts James's point.  Typing belongs
> > in the semantic model and James points out that TREX and RELAX don't make
> > the (IMO) mistake of interposing typing between the syntax and semantics.
>
> If you think it's a mistake, blame the compiler people who came up with
> annotating syntax with semantic constructs. Personally, I think it's
> quite a convenient way (that still leaves the issue of whether XSD
> should include it unresolved though).

The compiler people rarely make a neat break between syntactic and
semantic processing.  YACC has

start   :       exp1
                { exp_value = $1; }
        ;

So the semantic constructs (implementation of behavior) is right in there
with the grammar.

I think that markup languages occupy quite a different space.  The idea is
to *separate* the data from the processing, which to me means that we can
just blindly import ideas from compiler theory any more than we can from
object-oriented development.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
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