Real Men use Lojban WAS: Re: Real Men use XML, was quote, was Google Earth...

[aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net]

>   What XML gives you is a standard way to define the structure,
> schema, and so on, in a way that is unambiguous and machine-friendly.

Hm. "unambiguous" and "machine-friendly".  Lojban, which is formally
defined by a yacc grammar, meets both these criteria.

>   As others have said, the major benefit to this is you don't have to
> write a new parser and validator every time you create a new data
> structure.  You just use the pre-existing XML library.  Likewise, you
> save some time in ramping up a new syntax or whatever.  Kind of like

There's a standard parser for the Lojban language, too.  And since a
spoken language can represent pretty much anything humanly
experienceable, there's no doubt that it can represent any computer
data the programmer chooses.

The big advantage which Lojban has over XML is that you don't need to
design elaborate ontologies.  Lojban has a pre-existing, universal,
ontology: the whole of human experience.  No need to document data
structures or their meanings---because the data structure is a spoken
language itself.

Ontologies, standards, and parsing aside, Lojban is easier for humans
to author/edit than XML, and can be spoken aloud.  Try doing that with
XML!

For those curious, the example I posted:

>  la fus. se skari lo blanu
>          gi'e mitre li papici loka clani
>          gi'e rainei lo bavyvacysai poi se cmene zoi gy. pie .gy. ku'o
>                   .e lo skina poi se cmene zoi gy. Brazil .gy. ku'o
>          gi'e ki'ogra li rere

translates to:

   something called Foo has color(blue)
           and measures-in-meters(the number 1.3, in-the-property-of length)
	   and has-favorite(a dessert which is named "pie"
                            AND a movie which is named "Brazil")
           and measures-in-kilograms(the number 2.2)