"Vun Kannon, David" wrote:
> 
> The point Paul raises below was the chief justification, I believe, in the
> creation of PDF out of Postscript. 

Don't even get me started on Postscript...oops, too late.

Beyond the halting problem Postscript demonstrates a huge sociological
problem in programming languages used as 4GLs. It is extremely difficult
to justify a new declarative feature because anything you need to do can
be done "in code." This results in postscript files that are made up of
90% "function library" and 10% "data" because nobody ever sat down to
convert the huge "function libraries" into built-in functions. This is
another reason that I fought against the xsl:script element type. 

The xsl extension facility is, I think, the right level of separation to
allow us to accurately guage what extensions people are using and what
should go into the next version of the declarative syntax.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

And so, in one of history's little ironies, the global triumph of bad
software in the age of the PC was reversed by a surprising combination
of forces: the social transformation initiated by the network, a
long-discarded European theory of political economy, and a small band
of programmers throughout the world mobilized by a single simple idea. 
 - http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html


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