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At 03:35 PM 12/16/2002, Mike Champion wrote:
>>I believe that it is impossible to optimize *both* API and data
>>representation/protocol.
>
>Reminds me of the "syntax - data model duality" I've proposed ... sortof
>an uncertainty principle of formats vs APIs. There's something deep here
>that I don't think software engineering has a good handle on right now....
>Does someone with a better handle on recent developments in computer
>science or software engineering have a better answer
... maybe but I wouldn't know ...
>or compelling refutation to the assertion that we're in somewhat uncharted
>theoretical territory here?
I don't know about that either, except that sometimes I wonder whether this
isn't a Nominalist vs. Realist debate in another guise. That is, there are
those who believe a string is just a string (and sufficient unto the day is
the string thereof), and then those who take XML as a format or notation as
a rather uninteresting or unattractive (albeit sometimes a useful)
*representation* of a "true" data object, or at least (might say a more
sophisticated Realist) of a better representation (perhaps as an in-memory
instantiation of an abstract object) of the true abstraction than any poor
string (so non-optimized!) can be....
(Another way of getting at this distinction is by asking "so what exactly
are you putting into your pipeline?")
So the theoretical territory may be uncharted, but there are plenty of old
stories about it.
Nudging up on these issues, I wrote and delivered a paper to Extreme Markup
Languages last year ... see a copy, if you are interested, at
www.piez.org/wendell/papers/signsystems.pdf.
Regards,
Wendell
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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