The issue is that XSD came along much later, and its use did not become binding in XML validation scenarios, hence partial success, even when the XSD-based validation tooling was available at the time.
XSD provides a clean abstraction for the technical validation that sits separately from the application / business / processing layers and dramatically increases the chances of a «clean» request reaching the aforementioned layers without having to roll multiple defensive checks in there.
Granted, an XSD can become complex very quickly, especially if indulged in too much, but it does not have to be.
AT&T did not ship with the kernel source code, but they often shipped with the compiled object files of the kernel and a command line utility that allowed to change the kernel configuration parameters, after which the kernel would get re-linked into a new one.
Not open source by any definition, but it was a viable way to obtain a new kernel image. The practice has become obsolete after the adoption of loadable kernel modules across nearly all UNIX flavours, with the exception being OpenBSD (if my memory serves me well).
You have just described OSF/1 (and later – Tru64) – a certified UNIX with a hybrid kernel operating over a Mach microkernel, BSD userland, POSIX conformance etc.
This could be a great fit for Prolog, in fact, as it excels at the search.
Each resolved record would be asserted as a fact, and a tiny search implementation would run after all assertions have been made to resolve the IP address irrespective of the order in which the RRsets have arrived.
A micro Prolog implementation could be rolled into glibc's resolver (or a DNS resolver in general) to solve the problem once and for all.
Finnish case markers vary a lot from word to word, because of not only vowel harmony but other features of the word stem, and consonant gradation which is a weird feature of Uralic languages.
For the subtraction example, some numbers would be 50:tä 5:llä and others 6:tta 3:lla. Of course you could encode for all those possibilities and successfully parse them, but it would feel weird for a compiler to reject an expression because it's ungrammatical Finnish.
Also it would feel weird if you first write (vähennä muuttujaa 256:lla) but then realise you made an off-by-1 and have to change it to (vähennä muuttujaa 255:lla) but that doesn't compile because it should be 255:llä, so you have to remember to change two things.
But on the other hand, that's just how it is to write in Finnish, so in prose we don't really think about it. In natural language, it's normal to have to change other stuff in a sentence for it to continue making sense when you change one thing.
A grammatical mood indicates the modality of the verb, and some languages possess rich inventories of the grammatical moods. They are called differently in different languages, but mood is an established term in English.
English has indicative («go», «is going» etc), subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»), imperative («go!»).
German has two conditional moods – Konjunktiv I and II, for example.
> English has ... subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»)
That isn't the English subjunctive.
You're correct that this construction expresses the same thing that another language might express by marking a non-indicative mood on the verb, but it would not conventionally be said to use a non-indicative mood. That went is a normal past-tense indicative verb and the modality is expressed by the whole structure of the clause, not just by the inflection of the verb.
In linguistics there's a whole set of parallel vocabulary where one set is for grammatical forms and the mirror set is for the semantics usually expressed by those forms. So you have grammatical "tense" and semantic "time" or grammatical "mood" and semantic "modality". You got the modality right, but not the mood.
Compare the conventional analysis that he will be there tomorrow expresses future time, but is not in future tense because there is no English future tense.
No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».
I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.
English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.
> Chinese novels are on the other side of the spectrum. The sentences simply can't be very long and but often don't have any connecting words between sentences. The readers have to infer.
There is no grammatical ceiling on sentence length in Sinitic languages, Chinese languages (all of them) can form long sentences, and they all do possess a great many connecting words. Computational work on Chinese explicitly talks about «long Chinese sentences» and how to parse them[0].
However, many Chinese varieties and writing styles often rely more on parataxis[1] than English does, so relations between clauses are more often (but not always) conveyed by meaning, word order, aspect, punctuation, and discourse context, rather than by obligatory overt conjunctions. That is a tendency, not an inability.
Sure. You can try to create arbitrarily long sentences with nested clauses in Chinese. Just like in English you can create arbitrarily long sentences like: "I live in a house which was built by the builders which were hired by the owner who came from England on a steamship which was built...".
But it feels unnatural. So most Chinese sentences are fairly short as a result. And it's also why commas, stops, and even spacing between words are a fairly recent invention. They are simply not needed when the text is formed of implicitly connected statements that don't need to be deeply nested.
To give an example, here's our favorite long-winded Ishmael: "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains." The Chinese translation is: "是的，这里坐着的是一群老水手，其中有很多人，在怒海中会毫不畏怯地登到巨鲸的背上——那可是他们一无所知的东西啊——眼都不眨地把鲸鱼斗死；然而，这时他们一起坐在公共的早餐桌上——同样的职业，同样的癖好——他们却互相羞怯地打量着对方，仿佛是绿山山从未出过羊圈的绵羊"
Or word-for-word: "Yes, here sitting [people] are the group of old sailors, among them there are many people, [who] in the middle of the raging sea can/will without fear on the whale's back climb. That whales were something they knew nothing about".
The subordinate clauses become almost stand-alone statements, and it's up to the reader to connect them.
I can see your point now, and we are in agreement that nested clauses are uncommon and at the very least sound unnatural in Sinitic languages, but it is distinct from «The sentences simply can't be very long and often don't have any connecting words between sentences».
Strictly speaking, complex nested clauses are slowly on the way out of English as well due to the analytical nature of its present form, which is what the cited article partially laments, and remain a distinctive feature of highly inflected languages (German, Scandinavian, Slavic, etc.).
> Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at half a page long), but even then there is a beauty to it.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences.
Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
XSD provides a clean abstraction for the technical validation that sits separately from the application / business / processing layers and dramatically increases the chances of a «clean» request reaching the aforementioned layers without having to roll multiple defensive checks in there.
Granted, an XSD can become complex very quickly, especially if indulged in too much, but it does not have to be.
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