opening a text document to show a .txt file through abrowserlink

[Erik Max Francis]

Cliff Wells wrote:

> Not intrinsically, but it can certainly be used as such.  I used a
> custom XML parser to script interview questionaires for a call center
> I
> worked at.  The XML files were most definitely programs.  Markup tags
> were used to set internal variables in the interpreter.  They even had
> goto style logic and could loop.  Of course, this was all done
> *outside*
> the XML file itself (by the Python program reading the file),
> nevertheless the XML file itself determined how this was done.

But when we write Python programs, we're actually creating ASCII (or
perhaps Latin-1 :-) text files and then running them as Python scripts. 
In your case, XML is just the medium.  It's certainly not the program
language itself, anymore than ASCII is a programming language because
you can write Python programs in it.

XML, like HTML, is purely markup.  Other programs may do something else
with that markup (like interpret as a program, or run an embedded
script), but HTML and XML are not programming language themselves,
anymore than ASCII text is a programming language because compilers and
interpreters can use them as input.

> Consider a "programmable" toy that was popular
> several years ago.  You could specify, by using a numeric keypad on
> it,
> how far it should go in a given direction and various other things. 
> It
> certainly wasn't Turing-complete and yet it was certainly a "program"
> entered onto its keypad.

Well, there are certainly different classes of the term _program_
involved here.  We're talking about programming as in computer
programming.  When people tell a VCR to record a certain channel at a
certain time, they often refer to that as "programming," but obviously
that's not the same thing.  Similarly, when television stations select
what they're going to show at what times in a given week, that too is
sometimes called "programming," but obviously again that's not what
we're about here.

You could say that when someone says "programming HTML," they mean one
of these different kinds of programming, that just underscores the
point.  If you wish it to call it that, it's _not_ the same kind of
programming.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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