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opening a text document to show a .txt file through a browser link

Mel Wilson mwilson at the-wire.com
Tue Dec 31 10:35:24 EST 2002 
In article <3e101841$0$30011$1b62eedf at news.euronet.nl>,
"Nico Schuyt" <nschuyt at hotmail.com> wrote:
>Sam Hughes wrote:
>> Nico Schuyt" wrote >
>
>>> Disagree with that. A HTML page is a set of command lines. When sent
>>> to the interpreter, the browser, the result is shown on the screen.
>
>> Thus, by your logic, an ASCII text file is written in a programming
>> language.
>
>Wrong. The ASCII text is written in an application. The application is
>written in a programming language.

   In an abstract sense there's very little difference
betweenm program and data.  The main difference is
conventional.  In batch processing days we used to call the
smaller dataset "the program" and the larger ones "the
data".  Lately it's been the other way around.

   You can imagine a machine which reacts to opcode 0x41 by
displaying the glyph 'A' and preparing the next space to the
right to be the next display space to use; opcode 0x42 by
displaying the glyph 'B'; opcode 0x0C by preparing the
corresponding space on the next line down... etc.

   Especially nowadays, with FPGAs and what-not it's not
impossible to build a machine that would interpret the
payroll master file as a set of commands that cause it to
print cheques, income-tax reports, and so on.

   Mostly off-topic for Python, and I don't want to wake up
the Lisp people again.  I suppose there's some tiny
relevance to the question of what gets built in to a
language and what doesn't.

        Regards.        Mel.
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