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Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr
- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- To: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2023 10:05:58 -0700
I wrote the first complete and AFAIK fully conforming XML parser, Lark, in Nov/Dec 1996 (Yeah, XML wasn’t quite finished yet) and it took several weeks, which annoyed me because I really had thought we’d managed to narrow it down enough to make it a one-week task.
Greetings, On 5 Jun 2023, at 17:26, Debbie Lapeyre wrote: And my version of the Grad-student writes a parser story (ain't time and distance wonderful) was that the XML spec had promised
that a 'reasonably competent graduate student' could write an XML parser in 3 days. And, near the end fo the spec process, a very bright grad student complained bitterly (and in jest) that
he COULDS NOT write one in 3 days, it had taken nearly 5.
My version of the story starts from a context where I wanted to take stuff from a parse of an XML document, but throw most of the parse away. I recall I did consider starting on doing this with sed, but after I had punched myself in the face for half-an-hour decided that a cut-down scanner would be smarter and educational. Three days later, I realised I'd written a large fraction of an XML parser by accident -- and the whitespace rules and, yes, unicode, were next on the list -- but that it would be much less fun and much more sensible to go with what should have been plan-0 and use a library instead. The lessons being that yes, +1, an XML parser is not a massive challenge even for someone without a lot of parser experience, that whitespace is a problem, and (the thing I might be adding to this thread) that there isn't a cut-down 'this'll do' version of such a parser which is useful. That's a sort of minimalism. Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.ukSUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.orgsubscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l...List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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