Re: Bob needs a new catchphrase

Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:

>paul c wrote:
>
>> BobTheDataBaseBoy wrote:
>> ...
>>
>>> To quote Allen Holub (a coder): "Just say No to XML". I will add, in
>>> all its forms.
>>
>> The thing is, a bunch of people were asleep at the switch when the
>> internet's growth underlined the need for better transfer formats, so as
>> often happens the first attempt even though inferior prevailed.
>
>I respectfully suggest no new transfer formats were needed in the first
>place. To the ignorant, everything is a novel idea. Or perhaps better:
>those who ignore history are doomed to re-invent it.

     Some *adjustments* would be nice.

     Better handling of quoted strings is probably the biggest for me. I wrote a code generator for Visual FoxPro forms. Because I had to deal with nested quoting, I defined one quote style for my code generator. Tilde starts the string, the next character is the quoting character for this string, then comes the string which can not contain the quoting character, then the quoting character to terminate. Thus

          ~~He said, "This is example one."~
          ~QThis is example two.Q

     Something like this would be useful in data conversion.

> As
>> usual, the crowd took over and started using xml for all kinds of
>> nonsense, even though it was flawed from the start - I remember one of
>> the authors acknowledging how fat, byte-wise, it was and saying that
>> this could be remedied via compression. Some remedy, just jobs for the
>> boys.
>
>Like the Holy Grail, the quest for silver bullets is eternal.

     What gets me is how could people think that
          <quantity>6</quantity>

     Based on the success rate, werewolves have nothing to worry about! <BEG>

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:

     I have preferences.
     You have biases.
     He/She has prejudices.