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Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr

• From: "C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com>
• To: Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>
• Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:12:59 -0600

Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com> writes:

> Also, is it really relevant that you can't use off-the-shelf LALR
> parser generators for a markup meta language that itself acts as
> parser generator?

I'm a little puzzled here.  Were you not claiming, in your earlier mail,
that writing a parser for XML would be "exactly as complicated" as
writing a parser for SGML "since the parser lib does the heavy lifting"?
If it's not relevant, why did you bring it up?

On re-reading your earlier post, I see now that what you wrote can be
interpreted as saying only that for people using an existing parser via
a SAX interface, it doesn't matter whether the input is SGML or XML.
This is true, and I apologize for my misreading.

But since you ask, yes I think it's very relevant.  The relatively deep
intertwining of validation with everything else in ISO 8879 makes it
hard to write even simple tools.  That (imho) is part of what made the
Basic SGML profile a non-starter: a parser had to perform validation in
order even to distinguish data characters from other characters.  If
8879 had been designed to be parseable using standard parser generation
tools (yes, grandchildren, there were such things back then), it's
possible there would have been a more tractable layering of information.

Michael

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software
    • From: Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>

• References:
  • Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/processed by software
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software
    • From: Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com>