Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr

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.

On Jun 5, 2023 at 9:53:38 AM, Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:

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.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

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