Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@Wikipedia.org writes:
Hello,
You must have debugged softwares using punch card as entry : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_card
Where they easier to read than XML ? :p
Well sure! After you printed them off using an IBM model 407 Accounting Machine of course. You could also run them through a printing key punch which would print the meaning of the holes along the top of the cards.
A fellow associate of mine would actually write programs sitting at a keypunch. A cool thing you could do, if you serialized everything using columns 72-80, was to put your changes at the end of a deck and run them through a card sorter to insert them. This worked poorly for deletions, however. I once mailed a program update to a friend by putting a stamp and address on a punch card and mailing it off.
Cards were a luxury compared to paper tape. At least you could replace cards on a one by one basis.
For unreadability, there was this language called RPG--Report Program Generator--that turned your IBM 1401 or System 360/Model 30 into an accounting machine. Each column of a card had different meanings. But RPG programs were luxuries compared to wiring a plugboard.
Then there was APL--A Programming Language--probably the champion for creating amazingly compact but totally unreadable and unmaintainable programs [the RegEx of its day], but mathematicians used to love it.
Debugging in those days often involved wading through pages and pages of core dump. We sold software to the C.I.A. They would send us core dumps with the top secret data cut out with a pair of scissors. That means some guy had to look through the dump figuring out which data was confidential.
... Just having a little fun.
I do agree XML isn't for human read, but it's great to export database datas or just formatting them so they can be used by another software that will display them to human. It just another layer between 2 computer softwares.
Absolutely. XML certainly has its place.
cheers,
Sorry for the off topic discussion.
Nick