Re: What is a lightweight language

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Bruce Lewis wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> The important context is programming (as opposed to text markup).

There are very few users of XML that try to make it into a programming
language. Even XSLT was not intended to be anything like a general
purpose programming language.

>...
> 
> For programming, s-exprs provide much better readability.  Not even the
> XSLT folks advocate using XML syntax to structure all programmatic
> expressions.  

No, but I think you'd have a heard time getting them to advocate using
all s-expressions either. ;)

>...
> I'm not actually thinking about motivating people to switch programming
> languages.  What I'm doing is providing ambitious web developers an
> attractive option for getting into server-side web programming.  The
> syntax feels similar to XML, yet is dissimilar enough to avoid confusion
> in a template system.

So the most apt comparison is not really with XML (even XSLT) but more
with PHP or ASP.

 Paul Prescod