That was my first thought too, anneli; Similar things should look the same, and different things should look different. And code and data are different things. Maybe I just haven't seen enough of it. But when the language extension starts looking like the data my internal alarm goes off telling me I've got to pay extra attention to keep things straight. I'm never thrilled when the internal alarm goes off. ;)

I just thought "Aaarrrggghhhh!!!! He's reinvented Cold Fusion!!!!" and then tried to claw my eyes out to make the horror go away.

The similarity between aXML and Coldfusion is superficial. Whilst it is true that they use an initially similar appearing markup, aXML is far more expressive and flexible.

In aXML tags are intended to be used heirarchically in unison with each other in a variety of ways, and the end programmer has complete control over their names and definitions which are perl subs stored in a hash table.

Indeed; it's one failing of Lisp, in a way: too much homoiconicity is not necessarily a good thing -- you spend much of your time trying to work out where are the function calls, what are the arguments. Macros don't help, as you need to look at the callee, work out whether it's a function or macro, and in the case of the latter, whether or how it evaluates its arguments, in order to know if or when side effects will occur!

Well, Lisp has enough merit to have survived literally for a handful of decades despite its aggravating characteristics. I don't know enough about aXML to know whether it would support currying, lambda functions, and other higher order utility that gives Lisp enough value to overcome the issues caused by blurring the distinction between data and code.




Dave