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9:24:35
beach
The minute I do that, it will be rejected by 90% of all potential users, as I have stated in the past.
9:25:25
beach
The entire idea is to avoid specifying such a syntax, possibly allowing every person to parse his or her favorite markup language and create the internal document.
9:25:30
loke
beach: True, but that doesn't preclude you having given it some thought? I guess I'm merely asking what kind of markup you personally prefer. Its viability in the real world nonwithstanding.
9:26:47
beach
I would be much more inclined to write myself an interactive CLIM application for updating it.
9:27:32
beach
Well, that's basically the reason I started thinking of something we *COULD* agree upon.
9:28:46
loke
beach: I don't think there is anything controversial in your document (since, as you say, you never touch on the bikeshedding topics). Most existing markup languages don't have a structure anyway.
9:29:47
beach
Exactly. And that's a huge mistake. Probably due to the fact that the languages the markup language parsers are written in are not expressive enough.
9:30:23
beach
Everyone is brainwashed by the Unix "philosophy" of taking a stream of bytes as input and producing a stream of bytes as output.
9:30:58
beach
So basically, there is nothing a user can do to a document, other than translating it so some other form.
9:31:29
beach
It is not possible to write a little routine to search for things, to reorder things, etc. Because there is no documented internal format.
9:32:26
beach
Only possibility is to write your own parser for this (largely undocumented) markup language, re-create the structure that the standard processor uses, but differently and in a different language, and then write some output bytes.
9:33:15
beach
Imagine the kind of interesting documentation processor we could create if we had an internal protocol for that kind of stuff. A few lines of Common Lisp code could do interesting things to the document.
9:34:46
loke
I'm not sure the developer community as a whole would see the benefits of structured information.
9:35:16
beach
Now, if the #clim channel were logged in a useful way (i.e. not click on an arror for every 12 hours) I could figure out who wanted to work on this.
9:36:36
loke
jackdaniel: That's part of it. The problem was that the library in itself replicates a few characters of native javascript code. It's lik eme looking for a library on QL in order to convert a string to a symbol.
9:37:04
loke
jackdaniel: The problem with the removal was one aspect, but it was just highlighting the utterly dysfunctional NPM community as a whole.
9:37:27
loke
You are aware, I presume, of the existant of a library in NPM called isArray. Which does exactly what you think it does.
9:38:42
jackdaniel
and as far as I can tell, there is quite a lot of such systems (serapeum, clack - just grepped through my quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software)
17:18:30
jackdaniel
some wise words about our reference backend :-) http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
18:01:47
beach
jackdaniel: Heh! Be careful, you may get attacked the way I was in #lisp the other day. I guess maybe #clim is safer.
18:09:04
jackdaniel
I'm attacked every here and then (what's understandable in most cases, since I throw opinions sometimes above my background), but I learn to forget about them fast ;-)