XML is a hybrid of a recursive hashtable (attribute to elements are keys) and Lisp-like recursive lists. <ELEMENT>foo bar</ELEMENT> is <ELEMENT list-content="foo bar"/>, where list-content is allowed to have recursive XML elements inside it. The purity of Lisp leads to ugly position-dependent parameters. When does position inherently matter? Anything ordered, of course...
There is a fundamental tension between ordered lists and unordered key-value(s) pairs as the two True Data Structures. (There's set, too.)
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