Assignment Versus Equality

[Marko Rauhamaa]

sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com:

> On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 7:09:35 AM UTC-7, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com>:
>> > Were there other languages that did something similar?
>> 
>> In XML, whitespace between tags is significant unless the document type
>> says otherwise. On the other hand, leading and trailing space in
>> attribute values is insignificant unless the document type says
>> otherwise.
>> 
>> > Why would a language designer think it a good idea?
>> >
>> > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea?
>> 
>> Fortran is probably not too hard to parse. XML, on the other hand, is
>> impossible to parse without the document type at hand. The document type
>> not only defines the whitespace semantics but also the availability and
>> meaning of the "entities" (e.g., © for ©). Add namespaces to that,
>> and the mess is complete.
>
> XML isn't a programming language. I don't think it's relevant to the
> conversation.

The question was about (formal) languages, not only programming
languages.

However, there are programming languages with XML syntax:

   <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT>
   <URL: http://www.o-xml.org/spec/langspec.html>
   <URL: http://xplusplus.sourceforge.net/>


Marko