Breaking whats fixed

[rjelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

 It seems to me that we would be better if LISP fans did for LISP what 
 the JSON people did for JavaScript: make an minimal interchange syntax 
 that was 100% compatible with LISP syntax and functionality. [The choice 
 of which LISP dialect is left as an exercise for them :-)  but it should 
 be trivial apart from that.] Several proposals I have seen over the 
 years are obviously LISP fans wanting to use S-expressions, and baffled 
 why the obvious merits of the S-expression has not triumphed long ago.

 Then they wouldn't need to pretend it has anything to do with being a 
 markup language (i.e. the technology tradition that is based on 
 affording arbitrary and rigorous *annotation* of pre-existing text.)  
 There is room for multiplicity, for meeting private expectations.

 XML is not broken just because it doesn't look like S-expressions, any 
 more than S-expressions are broken because they don't look like XML, or 
 than EXI is broken because we cannot even read it. (Which is not to say 
 that XML would not benefit by hygenic short tags like </> being 
 available, and that S-expressions would not benefit by some different 
 syntax to signpost large or complex expressions: some churn is good.)

 Cheers
 Rick Jelliffe