XML alternatives [was Re: [Beowulf] What services do you run on your cluster nodes?]

[Simon Cross]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:11 AM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> YAML is nice until you accidentally change indentation.  Then the game is
> over.  Having bolluxed up many fortran codes in my (distant past), I have to
> say "just say no" to things *requiring* indentation.  In YAML's case, it
> suffers from the same problem with Python (yeah, I am gonna get some nasty
> dirty emails now).  Structure by indentation is IMO *evil*. I have heard
> that GvR actually agrees with this, though that is 3rd order hearsay.

<snarky>
Unlike C where getting the bracket nesting wrong can never mess up the
code and no one has ever been caught out by the indenting not matching
the bracketing.
</snarky :)>

Fortran was bad because you had to line things up in particular
columns [1]. The "significant whitespace is bad" was really just a
slogan for "we don't like how early versions of Fortran did things".
Python (and Haskell) don't work like early Fortran did either.

[1] This seems to have been the result of mapping the code to punch cards.

Schiavo
Simon