Formalism Or Prose

I have been doing some research in typesetting, fonts etc.  The following sentence strikes a chord with me.  The author is apologizing for not nailing down his description... for giving a sloppy description... and is basically saying that if he were to give a perfect description it would be too complicated... I wonder if programming in C instead of C++ is more like prose.  Here is the quote:

Attempts have been made to formalise orthography description, to the level of producing an XML schema. The problem is that conforming the description to the formal model itself is, in effect, a form of encoding of the orthography. And it is even harder to conform some descriptions to a formalism than it is to express them in prose. This does not nullify those attempts to formalise, but the presupposition taken here is that informal information is far more valuable than no information at all and the world needs this kind of information in any form it can get it!