Extensible Programming Article

["Barnhill William" <barnhill_william@bah.com>]

Found an interesting article that I thought seemed in line with the 
extreme extensability article, here: 
http://pyre.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/xmlprog.html


It's titled "Extensible Programming for the 21st Century", and the 
intro is below.
-----------------------------
In his OOPSLA'98 keynote Growing a Language [Steele], Guy L. Steele Jr. 
said, "From now on, a main goal in designing a language should be to 
plan for growth." Functions, user-defined types, operator overloading, 
and generics (such as C++ templates) are no longer enough: tomorrow's 
languages must allow programmers to add entirely new kinds of 
information to programs, and to control how that information is 
processed.

This article argues that next-generation programming systems will 
accomplish this by combining three specific technologies:

compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools will be plugin 
frameworks, rather than monolithic applications; 
programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages; 
and 
programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers can 
represent and process data and meta-data uniformly. 
These innovations will change programming as profoundly as structured 
languages did in the 1970s, objects in the 1980s, and components and 
reflection in the 1990s. To see why, we must first examine the 
shortcomings of the systems programmers use today. We begin with two of 
the most popular: the Unix command line, and Microsoft's Component 
Object Model (COM).


----- Original Message -----
From: Peter C Davis <peter.davis@neustar.biz>
Date: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 5:27 pm
Subject: RE: [xdi] ActionItem: Addition to charter

> No, but interop events ARE well reguarded (SSTC has had many over 
> time,both public and private).
> 
> +1 for Conformance unit tests with the following caveats:
> 
> 	- No "DataWeb" logo (implies a service mark which _demands_ 
> "policing"of it's use
> 	- I do not think that the Committee membership by constrained 
to the
> XDI voting membership.
> 
> --- peterd
> 
> On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 17:09, Wachob, Gabe wrote:
> > Dave- 
> > 
> > Initial thoughts...
> > 
> > * There's an entire TC (XSLT Conformance) whose charter it is to 
> develop test cases for XSLT (don't know its status).
> > 
> > * I'd favor such an effort even if it there weren't precedent. 
> Creating test cases is a very common practice in the W3C working 
> groups and I think its to their great benefit.
> > 
> > * The only real issue I see is the process for creation and the 
> normative status of such test cases. Its often useful to develop 
> the test cases in parallel with implementation so as to focus on 
> obvious conformance issues, but more importantly, real world 
> interop issues. I'm not sure OASIS is really setup to do ongoing 
> implementation support (though it would be nice if there were a 
> formal mechanism for doing so). 
> > 
> > 	-Gabe
> > 
> >  
> > __________________________________________________ 
> > gwachob@visa.com
> > Chief Systems Architect
> > Technology Strategies and Standards
> > Visa International 
> > Phone: +1.650.432.3696   Fax: +1.650.554.6817
> > 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Dave McAlpin [mailto:dave.mcalpin@epok.net]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 2:03 PM
> > To: 'Barnhill William'; xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
> > Subject: RE: [xdi] ActionItem: Addition to charter
> > 
> > 
> > Is there a precedent for this at OASIS?
> > 
> > Dave
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Barnhill William [mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com]
> > > Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:57 PM
> > > To: xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
> > > Subject: [xdi] ActionItem: Addition to charter
> > > 
> > > I'd like to get a +1/-1 consensus of the following text to 
> fulfill my
> > > action item of an addition to the charter that provides 
> clarification> > on interoperability testing:
> > > 
> > > The XDI TC will provide a collection of unit tests to improve
> > > interoperability among different XDI implementations.  When an
> > > implementation passes all the tests it should be interoperable 
> with any
> > > other implementation that also passes the tests and will be 
> entitled to
> > > use the logo "Designed for the DataWeb".  While not required, 
> it is
> > > suggested that all implementers run these tests before public 
> release> > of their implementation.  The unit tests will be 
> maintained as an Open
> > > Source project hosted on Apache.org and licensed under an Apache
> > > Software Foundation (ASF) 2.0 license.  This project will use 
> the roles
> > > and responsibilities as the defined by the ASF at the URL:
> > >    http://jakarta.apache.org/site/roles.html
> > > The members of the XDI TC shall make up the Projet Management 
> Committee> > (PMC)
> > > 
> > > 
> 
>