On Tuesday 22 July 2008 18:21, José Matos wrote: > Clearly you did not had to deal with the lyx file format like I did. :-) > If your idea of a parser is a set of regexp's that is so 80's. ;-) [clip] > It is funny to see all this nostalgia around something that is/was a > nightmare. If the syntax was so clear you would not have the problem of > crashing lyx with a bad formed file (a file modified by scripts).
When the discussion reverts to "your thingamabob is from another decade/century so it must not be good by today's standards", you know that thingamabob is pretty darn good, or else there would have been a more powerful argument against it. First of all, I understand *exactly* why an XML native format is an improvement for the LyX application. I'm limiting my point to the concept that something old has to be something bad. Modern things are usually improvements, but often are not improvements in quality or usefulness. They can be improvements to profit margin (e.g. most MS Windows "improvements"), or marketing improvements (all the silly little expensive features thrown into basic family cars today), or improvements in restricting use (DRM), or improvements in price (crummy bicycles from Walmart). Sometimes older stuff has more quality or usefulness. In 1969 and the early 1970's, Ken Thompson and the gang made Unix with the philosophy of little executables that do one thing and do it right. Stdin, stdout and pipes were the glue language with which these little executables could be cascaded to produce a substantial result. This enabled logical-thinking non-developers, and also developers, to produce those substantial results in an hour, with perhaps the greatest encapsulation that's ever been achieved in the computer world. Each little executable has one input and one output, each being a measurable test point. For batch processes this "programming" technique is every bit as productive as it was 39 years ago. There may be things wrong with awking, seding and perling data into submission, but the age of these tools is not one of them. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
