OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[Stephen Horne]

On Sat, 08 Mar 2003 11:45:27 +0000, Frodo Morris
<graham.lee at invalid.wadham.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

>OK, I'm an English national so maybe I'm not your target audience, but 
>just wondered whether or not you'd checked out SuperX++ 
><http://xplusplus.sourceforge.net/index.htm>?  It's an OOPL written 
>entirely in XML syntax.  I came across this originally in 
>comp.lang.lisp, where someone posted it claiming it was a fantastic 
>example of a language with a strange syntax and little practical use. 
>As this came from a hardened LISP developer I thought it might in fact 
>be quite elegant and well-structured ;-)

I haven't seen this before, but I have seen (and considered) similar.
In the most extreme form, I considered having an XML representation of
the semantics (basically the abstract syntax tree that the parser
would normally construct) and allowing people to invent their own
syntaxes almost arbitrarily.

Of course, that is quite close to defining a bytecode standard and
expecting others to design the language and write the compiler ;-)

A quick look at the samples show that this language actually has a
plaintext form (shortx) which is then translated to XML. Which means
it can't make any special use of XML features. To be honest, I don't
understand the point - the XML syntax seems a redundancy rather than a
feature.

-- 
steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk