[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
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:48:09PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:13:40PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > I'm sorry, but I didn't read anything about any specific version of Perl in > Tim's article, and my impression was that he meant simple regexen. It's OK, he wasn't very clear, but he did say "new" in there somewhere. > Or are you > seriously meaning to put in Tim's mouth that it would be easier to write a > YACC-like parser on your own than to re-use an existing XML parser? No. > > None the less, it's worth noting that one of the use cases for XML from > > the beginning was the "desparate perl hacker" who had to change, say, > > part number 1976 to 3072 in 100,000 documents without affecting dates, > > and had an afternoon to do it. That specific use case was achieved in > > practice for most people. > > I don't dispute that the use case was met, but I think the use case is as well > met by using, say Python/DOM/generators as it is using regexen, It's hard to do a round-trip transformation in those -- a typical constraint is that you must not change the rest of the documents, including * white space * entity references * cdata sections so that a textual "diff" will show what was altered. I agree with you that using a parser is better in general, but the point is that XML is amenable to either approach. Best, Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, liam@w..., http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ Ankh's list of IRC clients: http://www.valinor.sorcery.net/clients/
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