[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A better way to construct regular expressions in XML Schem
But he doesn't want to do data extraction. He just wants to chunk up a large regular expression. We need to be careful about a degree of nanny-ism, that just prevents people from getting the job done. The sure result of refusing to provide (abusable) general mechanisms is an explosion of specific mechanisms, until the committees will is sapped and they have to make decisiona about the boundary of what the provide is (since we cannot enumerate every use case). XSD tried to enumerate every case for parameter entities, and even then had to admit defeat at a certain point (which is surely what "redefine" is! Not only a sign of limits, but a kind of hygenic macro, in my eyes at least. Which is why all right-thinking people hate redefine, because it suggests life is more complicated than we can plan for.) And then the users who, as night follows day, do have that "edge" case, are left hacking together some home-made macro system anyone. Perhaps the exemplar for this is generics in OOP languages. They really tried to avoid them, with classes and interfaces and traits and inheritences and so on. But ultimately they all still needed to add them: and generics are the most macro-like things you find. Now, of course, I can see the advantage in annotations and DSLs that can be manipulated as things in their own right. But we shouldn't sneer at simple direct text replacement: it is not always BFI but sometimes the simplest and most elegant solution. On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 12:05 PM, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
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