At 4:38 PM -0500 3/27/97, Tim Showalter wrote:
I'm working on a draft for a filtering language. I have one fairly
fundamental question: should the language be geared to be machine-readable
or human-writable? It would be far easier to write a prefix-oriented
language with lots of LISP-like syntax, but I believe most users find that
difficult to use (and it is my limited experience it's hard to balance
parens without an editor that helps out).
I think we should gear it towards human use. That makes it easier to
debug, easier for people to create their own scripts without a user agent,
etc. If we keep it simple enough, it will still be able to be read,
edited, and generated by a GUI user agent.