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> On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:48:09PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > > On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:13:40PM -0700, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > I'm sorry, but I didn't read anything about any specific version of Perl in > > Tim's article, and my impression was that he meant simple regexen. > It's OK, he wasn't very clear, but he did say "new" in there somewhere. > > > Or are you > > seriously meaning to put in Tim's mouth that it would be easier to write a > > YACC-like parser on your own than to re-use an existing XML parser? > > No. Phew! OK. > > > None the less, it's worth noting that one of the use cases for XML from > > > the beginning was the "desparate perl hacker" who had to change, say, > > > part number 1976 to 3072 in 100,000 documents without affecting dates, > > > and had an afternoon to do it. That specific use case was achieved in > > > practice for most people. > > > > I don't dispute that the use case was met, but I think the use case is as well > > met by using, say Python/DOM/generators as it is using regexen, > > It's hard to do a round-trip transformation in those -- a typical constraint > is that you must not change the rest of the documents, including > * white space > * entity references > * cdata sections > so that a textual "diff" will show what was altered. > > I agree with you that using a parser is better in general, but the point is > that XML is amenable to either approach. OK. I wasn't getting this point before, and it's a good one. Of course, I'd be much happier if more lexically rich XML APIs were the norm, but I think that would tend to make them *harder* and not easier for developers, so I think that's really a branch off to a different thread. On that thread somwhere would be my wishing that Simon would some day find it in his heart to port his experientations to Python :-) -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Use internal references in XML vocabularies - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerw orks/xml/library/x-tipvocab.html Universal Business Language (UBL) - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/l ibrary/x-think16.html EXSLT by example - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-exslt.html The worry about program wizards - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7238 Use rdf:about and rdf:ID effectively in RDF/XML - http://www-106.ibm.com/develo perworks/xml/library/x-tiprdfai.html Keep context straight in XSLT - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/libra ry/x-tipcurrent.html Using SAX for Proper XML Output - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/12/py-xml.ht ml SAX filters for flexible processing - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml /library/x-tipsaxflex.html
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