[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd be bette
>>Dare Obasanjo wrote: >>The "Desperate Perl Hacker" argument was a bogus claim for XML 1.0 because of the existence of >>entities and CDATA sections but is quite farcical now with the existence of the Namespaces in XML >>recommendation (and it's bastard spawn "QNames in content"). [Tim Bray] >Empirically false, at two levels. First, lots of people process XML with perl (or equivalent) all the time. >Second, the real requirement was to make it tractable to take a large body of document data and make >quick programmatic changes on it. Which, obviously, XML makes way easier. Ah, but what if the programs are *wrong* because of the failure to take account of all the lexical complexities required to make such programs *correct*. Just because lots of people do it, don't make it right. Right? Lets focus on a simple, straight question. Lets imagine we are developing a mission critical application - a life support machine. We need to detect the pulse of a patient in the data stream. There is a <pulse> tag that contains the data we want. What is the shortest *correct* program to extract out the pulse figures using regexp? I would argue it is a complete XML 1.0 WF parse! If it ain't, I'm not buying that life support machine. If I'm charged with developing the application, I'm firing any programmer that uses regexp to implement! Sean http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com
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