Re: Many different syntaxes in XML - is that good language design?

> 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 <[email protected]> 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:  &amp;  and &#x020; and &#032;
>
> 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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