Re: problems with identifiers and keywords...

Clayton Weaver wrote:
>>For example, SGML put markup in <> delimiters (whence HTML and now XML
>>does the same). However, SGML recognized that < and > might be useful
>>in text and allowed one to use some notation I forget to change the
>>delimiters.
>
> This general problem has annoyed me for a long time. I always thought
> that a wise thing to do when ucs-4 and utf-8 character encodings came
> into general use would be to define an arbitrary "NTD" (non-text
> delimiter) character value and give it an arbitrary glyph not found in
> any real natural language or in mathematics.


And therein lies the problem. Once you use your NTD glyph in a
language, it is no longer an arbitrary glyph not found in any language
- you've just created a language that uses it! If you then want to
describe that language within itself, you need a special
representation of the NTD. And we are back at square one. Might as
well just use a common, generic, overloaded delimiter: ()[]{}<>,
because that is what an NTD would become anyway.


Cheers,
Carl.

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