Re:An editor for composed programs
by willismichael on Thursday August 21, 2014 @10:47AM
(#8207588)
That's the point, HTML is just a hobbled lisp with an awkward syntax. If you're building a template engine in a lisp, it's much nicer to just use the native lisp syntax instead.
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HTML is a subset of lisp with a different syntax. The rest of your point holds without lashing out at HTML.
In different environments, different syntaxes show strength. What happens if you misplace a ) vs misplacing an </tag> ?
What happens when you misplace a tag, and it's around 1995, is that browsers somehow parse it anyway without complaining, rendering the page anyway. Users then believe that this is the correct syntax: closing tags is optional, as is the order in which it is done. Twenty years later, you end up with a mess of a situation where every browser has to support not only its own historic buggy behaviors but those of other browsers.
You cannot "misplace" a closing parenthesis, at best you can have too many of them not enough. Of course, you can enclose the wrong amount of material, but to see what is being enclosed, you just need parenthesis matching support in the editor. This is more common than XML tag matching support. E.g.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500989/jump-to-matching-x...