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RE: Recursive data structures

• To: 'Gavin Thomas Nicol' <gtn@r...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Recursive data structures
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 10:00:15 -0600

Yes.  When I had some input to the IETM 
db spec Bryan Caporlette designed, 
I set the SGML Declaration to limit 
the recursion depth.  It was arbitrary on my 
part but every now an then, someone would 
use a system tag to get down to switches 
and it was a "who cares" situation, or the 
mapping from the source relational db was 
funky and again, it went very deep.  I used 
to count the indentation number and use it 
as a rough estimate of system complexity. 

Don't go there.  It is a portal to hell. ;-)

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...]

On Thursday 17 January 2002 09:38 am, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> But any tool
> that will select/match a nest is a good idea beyond
> eyeballing it because any recursing element will
> make you curse right along with it.  

Interestingly, most DTD's, and certainly most instances, have markup 
depths of no more than 8 levels or so (often 3 to 5). I think this is 
becaus people have a natural limit of stacking, and anything more 
results in "stack overflow, brain dumped" problems.

The deepest (I think) I ever saw for constrained (ie. required) 
nesting was the MILSPEC stuff.

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