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Re: Common Lisp "let"



Bruce Lewis wrote:
> 
> Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> writes:
> 
> > <group name="wheel" passwd="XXXX" gid="0" user_list="root paul john"/>
> 
> You have structured data in user_list where the structure is not done
> via XML syntax.  To get the benefits of XML, 

XML has always explicitly supported the notion of multiple tokens in an
attribute. Since day 1. A validating XML parser *will* split these for
you and if you have a stupid parser it takes only one line of Python and
probably a similar amount of "brl" to split the words.

>....
> People using XML often instinctively switch to a less painful syntax for
> structuring data.  The same doesn't happen when using s-exprs.

So rather than using URLs and SQL statements, LISP folks always use
s-expressions? This is really the old debate, which we will not resolve
today, of whether it is really best to use a single syntax (i.e.
parenthesized syntax) for absolutely everything or use an optimized
syntax for each particular job. Also, S-expression users *do* avoid
"extra" parens in some cases and do parsing "in code" (i.e. treating
every other token specially) rather than letting the reader do it. This
is analogous to using whitespace separated text in attributes.

 Paul Prescod