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XML is designed for the creation of languages based upon self-describing markup. The inevitable evolution of these languages is called versioning. Versioning means adding, deleting, or changing parts of the language. Making versioning work in practice is one of the most difficult problems in computing, with a long history of failed attempts.
General purpose programming language deseigners also face the versioning problem, and use a variety of dirty tricks, pragmas and warnings. Perhaps there's something to be learned from the XML approach, though I don't really see how it can be applied to full feldged programming languages with rich syntactic and semantic constructs.
Be that as it may, this work is relevant for those designing XML vocabularies, arguably the dominant form of DSLs nowadays.
More on XML versioning can be found in the TAG Finding.
Posted to xml by Ehud Lamm on 12/23/03; 1:07:46 AM
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Versioning XML Vocabularies
