[defen]

I understand all this. Like many people, I've written programs in C++ templates. But I think we're talking past each other because you want to make a pedantic point. I'm using the words as they are generally understood, not in a technical computer science way. I'm talking about first-level stuff, not metaprogramming. Let me give you some questions to ponder:

- Is the text of Hamlet code?

- Was it code as soon as Shakespeare wrote it?

- If not, did it become code once the electronic computer was invented? Or did that happen once a version was stored in a way accessible to an electronic computer?

- Did all the existing paper copies immediately become code at that point as well?

[dragonwriter]

> Is the text of Hamlet code?

> Was it code as soon as Shakespeare wrote it?

Yes, the text of a play is code meant to be executed by humans.

[defen]

That is pretty funny, but not what I was going for :)

[TeMPOraL]

> But I think we're talking past each other because you want to make a pedantic point.

I guess that's true.

The flavour of "code vs. data" discussion in this thread was one of representation formats. You could argue that when looking at works of art from past centuries one should immediately say "data!" [0]. But in case of JSON, a format suspiciously almost identical to Lisp in structure, one needs to be careful in saying "it's for data, not for code".

Actually, I'm not sure what kind of point I'm trying to make, as the more I think of it, the more examples of things that are borderline code/data come to my mind. Cooking recipes is the obvious candidate, but think about e.g. music notation - it clearly feels more like "code" than "data".

I feel that you could define a kind of difference between "code" and "data" other than in intent, something that could put bitmaps into the "data" category, and a typical function into "code" category, but I can't really articulate it. Maybe there's some mathematical way to describe it, but it's definitely a blurry criterion. But when we're discussing technology, I think it's harmful to pretend that there's a real difference. Between configuration files looking like half-baked Lisp listings and "declarative style" C++ that looks like datasets with superfluous curly braces, I think it's wrong to even try to draw a line.

[0] - there's a caveat though. "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler[1] discussess briefly how the task of a poet is to carefully chose words that evoke particular emotional reactions in readers. It very much sounds like scripting the emotional side of the human brain.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book