Re: why doesn't gimp use guile?

[Per Bothner]

Alejandro Forero Cuervo wrote:
> In practice,  however, there  are way too  many Gnome  applications that
> should use a real extension language but use XML instead.

Huh?  XML is not a language, it's a format.  It's pure syntax.  It makes
a lot of sense to use XML for data and configuration files, because it
*is* such a standard, and it is easy to interchange and convert.

XML is very close to S-expressions, and if the Lisp community it been in
the right place at the right time, perhaps the world would be using
S-expressions insteda of XML.  But it wasn't and it isn't.

Now you can define a programming language using XML syntax, just as you
can define a programming langauge using S-expression syntax.  XSLT (the
Transformation part of the XML Stylesheet Language) is the best-known
example.  XSLT is a very useful and interesting language, but the syntax
is certainly tedious.  W3C experts have concluded that writing programs
that are actual valid XML files is not worth the verbosity, so the new
XQuery ("XML Query language") does not use XML syntax (though you can
have embedded XML fragments).

(I'm in the process of implementing XQuery, using the Kawa framework;
see http://www.qexo.org for more information.)

> On  the other  hand, XML  could be  seen as  any extension  language (no
> matter how ugly).  In this case, the "official" Gnome extension language
> you are misled: this place is occupied by Gnome's XML library.

XML is used in Gnome for configuration files and application data files.
It is not used as an extension language.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://www.bothner.com/per/