On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 7:37 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote: > > On Thu, March 20, 2014 18:52, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> xml isn't intended for humans - it is supposed to be parsed and >> verified by machines. The bigger question is why the machines aren't >> managing the config files themselves yet? >> > Possibly because the machines are running programs written by humans that need > to understand what they think they have told the machine to do in order to > determine why it is not doing what they want it to? Yes, but that reason is generally that someone changed the language syntax underneath it instead of settling on simple working APIs. What has actually stayed stable and backwards compatible over the years other than bourne shell syntax and perl (almost)? Everything else has made you repeat your work every few years instead of letting you build on it and advance. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com