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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.
> > 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.
Best,
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, liam@w3.org, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
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