Re: XML: The good, the bad, and the ugly

From: Laconic2 <laconic2_at_comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:39:08 -0400
Message-ID: <BtKdnY9o-LrlJO7cRVn-rQ_at_comcast.com>


"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:DeJcd.259960$MQ5.105742_at_attbi_s52...

> Yes, but this doesn't matter a whit. If your hardware used decimal
> digits, your source code would look pretty much exactly the same.
> And you'd still have the same dichotomy, between the native
> decimal representation of integers and the string-encoded representation.

I think some of the posts have confused the consequences of choosing digits with the consequences of choosing binary digits.

In the 1940s, there were some extraordinarily powerful analog computers built, for very specialized purposes. It wasn't at all clear, at that time, that a common music player, like a Rio, was going to use digital encoding of the sound. There are reasons why digital computers overwhelmed analog computers, but there are consequences to that choice.

Once you've chosen to go digital, choosing the binary digit as the most basic digit makes a lot of sense. Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 14:39:08 CEST

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