I managed to find a gold mine when it comes to URIs and identifiers: the DocBook notations module. DocBook is an older SGML/XML-based standard developed by OASIS used for writing documentations, and with its DTD comes a module that “imports” several then-common notations for use with unparsed entities.
One programming article worth reading is definitely What Color is Your Function? by Bob Nystrom. A good old rant about the design of several programming languages, one that separates them into two groups of good languages and bad languages, depending on a presence of a certain feature.
The gist of the article is describing a feature called “colored functions” and then analyzing languages depending on whether there is some mechanism akin to this. The presence of a callback mechanism for asynchronous programming is basically the only application of these colored functions, but I believe pointing out other similar mechanisms is worth doing.
Years after the conception of XML, it had been customary for programmers to point out its perceived flaws and suggest fixes to the language. This trend has somewhat declined in recent years, as developers have either learnt to live with XML, or discovered that they can use something else.
I do not share these feelings towards XML. In many cases, I find it suitable for various purposes, and I think many cases of criticism stemmed from misunderstanding. Yet even I would like to add some features to the language, based on my experience. Let's take a look at them.
