It's equivalent to very elaborate function calls with named and optional arguments and output parameters. The declaration s would be nightmarish Syntax is important
Yeah, the same way Dropbox is just a rediscovery of "an FTP account, mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem", which obviously is also more flexible and fundamental than a single-purpose SaaS service...
Sure, I agree syntax is important. It was just the wording made it sound like it was more than a redressing, hence I felt I was missing something.