::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Wednesday 06 February 2002 01:02, you wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 04:32:07PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> > A common trap. You're forgetting that ASCII is a binary format, a
> > sequence of 7bit numbers which happen to map to lookup table which
> > describes how to draw that character.
>
> If you say that plain ol' ASCII is not special*, you have a bootstrapping
> problem.  If all files need to conform to a DTD-a-like, then the DTD-a-like
> needs to conform too, and so does whatever describes that, and ...
>
> At some point, you will need to say "enough!" and make arbitrary
> definitions.

Agreed!

> You may as well stick with tried-and-tested convention and
> make plain ol' ASCII special

Disagreed!

Why just make ASCII special? Why not start with something a little higher 
level, like BER?

> * - or rather that nothing is special and that the whole system is
> self-describing

Difficult to do. Godel's incompleteness thereom and all that. The axioms have 
to come from somewhere...

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software