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[Roger Costello] The big "aha moment" for me back in the day was when it dawned on me that running Charles Goldfarb's ARCSGML from the command line was essentially equivalent to a lex phase, followed by a yacc phase.It just dawned on me that a "schema validator" is actually a parser. Some time later on, when I figured out the SGML Declaration stuff, it dawned on me that there was a pre-lex component also, that specified the lexical atoms that would then be turned into tokens (the lex-ing) that would then be structurally validated (the yacc-ing). Some time later on, when I figured out OMITTAG and CONREF an CONCUR etc., it dawned on me that I could tweak the parsing and validation and the resultant parse tree in various ways. Some time later on, my brain started seeping out of my ears and I began wishing that all the various phases had been neatly stacked on top of each other as separate pieces of work with some sane stream-centric data structure flowing between them. (I think this happened when I was reading the HyTime standard.) Some time later on, my brain fully exploded when I realised that there is no clean layered separation possible (at least that I could envisage) that would still give you all the features of full-on SGML. Some time later on, I concluded that this is inevitably true in any powerful text processing system because semantics - real semantics - is on great big hermeneutic circle. Sean
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