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On Thu, 18 May 2000 16:45:50 +0200, "David Brownell" <david-b@p...> wrote: >It's pretty common for language specs to ensure that their grammars >can easily be handled by parser generators -- commonly they'll be >done as LALR(1) [yacc/bison/...] or somesuch. If I recall correctly from my experimentation in that area, the XML grammar is already LALR(1) *if* you consider only the non-regular-expression productions (the ones that start with a lower-case letter). That assumes that you have a lexical analyzer that can generate all of the other productions as tokens. And that turns out to be the tricky part, because SGML/XML is highly context-sensitive when it comes to deciding whether a given character is a delimiter or not. You end up with the equivalent of a half-dozen or so separate lexical analyzers, and at any given point during the parse you invoke one of them, according to context. It's all rather messy and you pretty much lose all of the benefits of a lex/yacc-style table-driven approach. -Steve Schafer *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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