G'day all.
Quoting Iavor Diatchki
this mail does not contain anything constructive, but i thought i'd post it just so that it doesn't seem that haskell users are indifferent. i sincerely hope we don't use xml (or any variation of it) in the haskell libraries. good reasons of why not to use it have already been posted.
Well I'm personally in favour of XML as a general principle (mind you, I get paid for it, so I'm probably a little biassed), however there is absolutely no reason to use it here. You don't want to invent a new syntax + parser if you can avoid it. It's not hard, but it's something that users have to learn. XML is therefore a candidate, but since interoperability with non-Haskell code is very low on the list of priorities, this isn't a compelling argument in its favour. Using a subset of Haskell syntax seems ideal. It's simple, people already know it, and it's easy to work with. Cheers, Andrew Bromage