• From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@S...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:57:30 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...]
> Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 11:32 AM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re: An open plea to the W3C (was Re: XInclude vs SAX vs
> 
.
> 
> Edgser W. Dijkstra/ Turing Award Lecture/
> Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, Number 10,
> October 1972
> 
> Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must
> mention  PL/I, a programming language for which the
> defining documentation is of a frightening size and
> complexity. 

Nice quote! I'll amend my previous rant:  The default solution is to keep
piling on the complexity until ... someone else come along and carves "C"
our of XML's "PL/I".

I'm not sure how PL/I was developed, but it certainly has the flavor of
something that could have come from a W3C working group.  My biggest
frustration with the W3C is that whenever there is a clear choice between
"option A" and "option B", the decision ends up being "do both."  PL/I was a
similar compromise between FORTRAN and COBOL ... rather than factoring out
the intersection of their functionality in a clean way, the designers of
PL/I must have said "aw heck, let's just do both."

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