Re: Re: software design clarification

On 5/1/07, Eric M. Hopper <[email protected]> wrote:
> So, why is XML a bad format for representing parse trees?  The worst
> thing about it that I can see is that parse trees have references to
> identifiers that are described by other parse trees, and so the document
> would have a bunch of internal pointers in it.
>
> What reasons are there against XML in the specific case of ASTs?

One of them is performance. I am a developer of Py++ project. Py++ is
the code generator for Boost.Python library. There are few projects
that use Py++, where it takes huge amount of time ( 7-8 minutes ) and
memory ( up to 100 Mb ) to read AST generated by GCCXML. The format
used by it is pretty simple and was built to be parsed quickly. After
you parsed the data you want to do something with it. This is also
will take time.

I am pretty glad Stefan exposes AST to Python. This is much better
that "raw" xml.

There are other few good reasons why to not use XML.

-- 
Roman Yakovenko
C++ Python language binding
http://www.language-binding.net/