Re: [xml-dev] Many different syntaxes in XML

> Phew! That is a lot of different syntaxes.
>
> Is that good language design to have so many different syntaxes?
>
> Dealing with lots of different syntaxes is hard.

In 2008 I implemented a generic LR-1 parser in XSLT. It uses the XML representation of a set of parsing tables for a given LR-1 grammar. The parsing tables are generated by YACC (with a function I added to YACC's output generator).

The lexer also would use a set of monstrous-looking RegEx expressions for the terminal symbols of the specific language.

So any complaints of having to deal with a few languages that we know about in advance, fade in comparison with this LR-1 parser, written in XSLT, which (the XSLT) is actually an XML document, that uses the parsing tables of any possible (and unknown in advance) LR-1 languages and itself generates an abstract tree (in XML, of course), representing the parse.

For the case when the language to be parsed happens to be XPath 2.0:

https://github.com/dnovatchev/FXSL-XSLT2/blob/master/newWork/func-lrParse.xsl

https://github.com/dnovatchev/FXSL-XSLT2/blob/master/newWork/XPATH-Grammar.y

https://github.com/dnovatchev/FXSL-XSLT2/blob/master/newWork/XPATH-ParseTables.xml

https://github.com/dnovatchev/FXSL-XSLT2/blob/master/newWork/XPathParse1.xsl

And this is example of invoking this parser to parse one (the first) of many possible XPath expressions contained in this transformation:

https://github.com/dnovatchev/FXSL-XSLT2/blob/master/newWork/XPathParse1.xsl

Just invoke this transformation on any XML document (not used) such as <t />

Cheers,

Dimitre

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 4:14 AM Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

Hi Folks,

There are many different syntaxes in XML:

The comment syntax: 

The PI syntax: <? ... ?>

The CDATA section syntax: <![CDATA[ ... ]>

The DOCTYPE syntax: <!DOCTYPE ... >

The entity syntaxes: & and   and  

The namespace syntax: xmlns:foo="..." and <foo:bar>...</foo:bar>

Attribute/value syntax: x="blah"

The start-tag/end-tag syntax:

<baz>
<widget>...</widget>
</baz>

Phew! That is a lot of different syntaxes.

Is that good language design to have so many different syntaxes?

Dealing with lots of different syntaxes is hard. For example, I never remember the syntax for CDATA sections (in fact, I had to look it up just now).

Isn't it better language design to have a small number of syntaxes?

/Roger

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Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev

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