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