From: Kaz Kylheku
Subject: Re: Insanity
Date: 
Message-ID: <cf333042.0405202146.6e7182f6@posting.google.com>
"Paul F. Dietz" <·····@dls.net> wrote in message news:<······················@dls.net>...
> Frederic Brunel wrote:
> 
> > In this article, the Jakarta group has defined a new data format
> > called SDL (Simple Data Format) because they're just fed up with XML.
> > 
> >   http://jakarta.apache.org/hivemind/sdl.html
> 
> Oh wonderful.  Yet another overload of the acronym SDL.

This smells like the work of idle undergraduates. There is a kind of
eagerness to reinvent little syntaxes that flares for a while within
just about everyone who takes that stupid little parsing course
involving lex and yacc hacking.

I was there too. Every utility I wrote had a nice, whitespace-proof
configuration file syntax with nested curly braces, and various bells
and whistles, syntax error reporting down to the exact line and
character, etc. Less educated hackers tended to be envious and wanted
to borrow the code. ``I gotta get that config parser off of you one of
these days'' they would say as their strtok() calls choked on their
line-oriented syntaxes.

Sigh.
From: Steven E. Harris
Subject: Re: Insanity
Date: 
Message-ID: <q67n041sm2b.fsf@L75001820.us.ray.com>
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:

> Every utility I wrote had a nice, whitespace-proof configuration
> file syntax with nested curly braces, and various bells and
> whistles, syntax error reporting down to the exact line and
> character, etc. Less educated hackers tended to be envious and
> wanted to borrow the code.

Funny you mention that. One of these has been growing, or maybe
festering, a few desks away here. Lately, I've been trying to grow out
of the habit and into using the Lisp reader.

-- 
Steven E. Harris        :: ········@raytheon.com
Raytheon                :: http://www.raytheon.com