Markup language-like features in Perl6?

[Michele Dondi]

I am aware of at least one program that adopts XML for
(customizable/"skinnable") GUI descriptions. This has a sense for markup
languages are typically "descriptive", i.e. they say how something IS as
opposed to, say, procedural languages that let one implement something
that DOES something[1].

Of course as far as GUIs are concerned, they provide an interface for
"something that does something" as well, so one needs both
charachteristics and in fact an OO approach is typically applied, which
provides an IMHO excellent approximation to the concept of "describing how
something IS also including details about the parts of it that DO
something".

However I have the impression that there's still "too much" to it.
Granted, GUIs are intrinsically some order of complexity above textual IO,
but I think that letting the language have intrinsic markup
language(-like) features may make things much easier from the
huffmanization POV in these regards.

Now what I'm thinking about is a means of specifiying, say, "portions" in
the source that ARE (something). By default they won't be executed at all,
but they may provide useful hooks for a suitable module to assign a
meaning to them, and of course they should also provide the link with
"code that does something" (e.g. callbacks et similia).

Of course I began talking about GUIs, but I wouldn't like to
restrict everything to this particular aspect. Perl(6) is supposed to be a
mutiparadigmatic language with means to be specialized and "strenghtened"
into any of the supported paradigms. So I cannot see why a priori the
markup language pardigm shouldn't fit in this picture. HOW to do it
(efficiently/elegantly, etc.) is a whole another story...

[1] Although this varies from language to language. If you come to think
of TeX and its macro language you can see how approximative this claim is.

Michele
--
>A question out of curiousity: who is this Green of Green's functions?
>Is he the same person of Green's theorem? :)
Yes. He was also an early environmentalist; hence the current
phrases "green" this and "green" that...
- David C. Ullrich in sci.math, thread "Who is Green?"

[Luke Palmer]

Michele Dondi writes:
> However I have the impression that there's still "too much" to it.
> Granted, GUIs are intrinsically some order of complexity above textual
> IO, but I think that letting the language have intrinsic markup
> language(-like) features may make things much easier from the
> huffmanization POV in these regards.

Well, I don't really know how Perl's very expressive declarative data
structure support doesn't help you. Maybe you could give a rough, ugly
(if you don't have a nice proposal) description of what you mean.

Luke

[fonki...@gmail.com]

hi!

different idea for gui's: maybe some aspect oriented hooks may be cool
;-)

deeper in perl - thus maybe faster than:

http://search.cpan.org/~marcel/Aspect-0.08/lib/Aspect/README.pod

Cheers,
Armin