XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill babies

Re:XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill b... by GFischer on Saturday February 19, 2011 @08:59PM (#2240688)

I'll admit my ignorance about the existence of S-expressions (had to look them up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression )

I've used XML because .NET has a parser, and I'll probably use JSON because parsers are widespread... are there good standard parsers for S-expressions for .NET or other popular platforms?

A quick googling sends me here

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3051254/parsing-lisp-s-ex...

which makes me believe.NET can't natively process s-expressions with ease, and that's a HUGE minus for me.

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Re:XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill b... by dfox on Saturday February 19, 2011 @10:07PM (#2240847)

Few lines of code in the last answer is actually everything you need to parse (reasonable subset of) S-expressions. So there probably isn't any general purpose programming language that cannot handle S-expressions with ease.

That holds if you want to use S-expressions as data exchange format (or like network protocol as is done by Subversion). Parsing Common Lisp source is entirely different matter.

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Re:XML: Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't always kill b... by GFischer on Sunday February 20, 2011 @09:01AM (#2241856)

It does seem you can handle them, but we .NET people are lazy (as in, Larry Wall lazy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall ).

I agree with the poster's reply to that: "Yes I agree that this is simple and fast, but.. What I really want is a 1-D list of my own object types." I get that when using XML web services with .NET (though mostly when consumed with other .NET or similar languages !!! which goes against it being an universal data transfer language )

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