Re: Re: software design clarification

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 13:39 -0400, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> It may not be that bad as a storage format (Markus was asking for an
> in-memory representation he could apply XPath queries to). The only
> immediate argument that comes to mind is its verbosity (as usual).

Oh.  Well, near as I can tell, you can apply XPath queries to nearly
anything tree-like.  But, yes, XML is a horrible internal format.

> Parse trees don't have references, usually (or else they weren't
> trees, but graphs). References need to be created externally when
> interpreting a parse tree.

Hmm, so what happens when an identifier is referenced in one part of the
parse tree that was declared in another?

> Same as above. We are talking about in-memory representations, and
> there the XML-way of doing things would be a DOM, which, I think, is
> hugely inappropriate. (Even more so than with XML itself. :-) )

Yeah, I agree, as in in-memory representation, XML is awful.

> Right now the AST is stored on disk as a python pickle. That's mostly
> for convenience, because that is what Python supports out of the box.
> It's possible to get inventive and to consider alternative formats
> (for which writers and readers would need to be written. As Graydon
> points out, XML only provides the lowest layer. You'd still need to
> reconstruct the AST from the incoming XML data. That code doesn't
> exist.)

This is true.  And it sounds like there are already things that produce
XML parse trees, like GCCXML.

> Again, so far I haven't had any need to dive into that. There are much more important issues
> to be solved.

I agree.  I've been looking forward to a documentation generator for C++
that had a real parser in it for awhile.

Thanks for the explanation,
-- 
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they
be properly armed.  -- Alexander Hamilton
-- Eric Hopper ([email protected]  http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --

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