On 12 May 2022, at 11:53, Roger L Costello wrote:
"Yes, working with the XSD specification is a nightmare; it's the
toughest spec I've ever had to work with other than Algol 68, and
unlike Algol 68, some of the apparent formality turns out to be
spurious; when it gets to tricky things that ought to be formal,
like whether two types are identical, the spec bails out."
I remember reading the HyTime spec, and remember feeling a modest
sense of achievement when I managed to work out what it was talking
about, and realised that what it was talking about was not what it
said it was talking about, and that the former was significantly more
interesting than the latter.
I've had a similar feeling over the years, realising that what a spec
really described was a level of meta-ness I hadn't known even existed.
