On 12/05/2022 12:10, Norman Gray wrote:
>
> 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.
Peter
