Hi Michael
Michael said:
I thought a meta language was a kind of language.
Didier replies:
Thinking about this subject this week end, I even more
strongly believe that a meta language like XML is not a
language per se but a structure used to create a language.
You missed my point: a meta language is a language used to describe
other languages. As such, it is itself a language. Human languages,
computer languages, foreign languages, and meta languages are all kinds
of language, by definition.
Certainly, the DTD subset of XML is a meta language and is therefore a
language.
Without DTDs, I think it would indeed be difficult to argue that XML is
a language (or, for that matter, a meta language). It's then more of an
alphabet, a set of symbols from which languages can be constructed.
We are way off topic, and this kind of meta-meta discussion is far
better held on xml-dev, where people are used to deleting such
threads...
Michael Kay
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