Re: [xml-dev] Can the Chinese language express more things in XMLthan can be expressed in English?
I am not an expert, or even a novice. But I think often it is more if a question of what can be said readily or with more difficulty in each language.
But I think there is a feature of East Asian (CJK) languages that may kinda fit what you are asking about.
That is that they all have grammar (particles) to establish the "topic" for the rest of the sentence and assumed in subsequent sentences. This allows simplification of subsequent sentences, and even omission of verbs.
For English, imagine most of our sentences were formed by saying "Now let's talk about X: ..." Which is kinda how Japanese "wa" operates: you clearly establish the topic X, then make your statement or question etc about it.
Or imagine we formed questions using topics: "X is hot; what about Z?" That is kinda how the Chinese terminal particle "ne" works.
So the difference with Command, Question or Information is that, in a sense, it sets what can be elided in subsequent exchanges, and how things will be interpreted.
Merely talking of "sentences" as if they were atomic units of communication is misleading: each phrase builds on each preceding one, and can be clarified by each subsequent one, in the exchange.
The relevance for message passing should be clear: the issue of "what can be elided for efficiency?" on our proticols is to some extent subsumed by the question "how do we mark up that some information can be implied true for the rest of the exchange?" (which is not simple REST.)
This might be generalized to the question of how does a message alert the recipient about which part of its data is of interest or importance? What has changed?, what should be responded to?, what is A1 or E5?, and so on.
Plus, you might see it as related to the question of, if you are serialising a relational database into hierarchical elements, which elements go at the top-level, the second level, etc: this is a question of setting the "topic" of each major branch, context information by which the lower level facts are known.
Regards
Rick
