[CMake] XML CMake ?

[David Somers]

Jorgen,

> Just out of curiosity. Why isn't CMAKE handling a flavor of XML for it's
> make system ? Personally I think the scripting language used now is a
> bit outdated. It gets the job done, but it's horrid when it needs to be
> parsed back, and very error prone and redundant (speaking of IF .. END
> constructions).

I agree with you that the CMake language does have some annoying features,
but there's nothing that wrong with it to justify switching to XML. Sure,
the syntax can be a bit ugly (verbose/repetitive) and occasionally error
prone, but cmake scripts are very, very short... its not as if you are
writing 10,000 LOC in it... so a bit of verbosity and repetitiveness isn't
going to kill you.

If writing languages in XML was so great, why aren't people rushing to
convert PHP, Python, Perl, C, C#, and every other language into something
based on XML.

Remember, XML was designed for data markup, not to be used as markup for
programming langauges.

> Just an idea, I am happy with CMake for the current projects, but it is
> always nice to see improvement, and XML is perfect for this. There are a
> lot of build tools that use the XML markup which is a big plus because
> people are familiar with the markup already.

OK. Things like visual studio has project and build files in XML... however,
they are really just data files... not tiny/script languages.

Greetings from snow-covered Luxembourg,

David