Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software

 I wrote the first complete and AFAIK fully conforming XML parser, Lark, in
Nov/Dec 1996 (Yeah, XML wasn’t quite finished yet) and it took several
weeks, which annoyed me because I really had thought we’d managed to narrow
it down enough to make it a one-week task.

On Jun 5, 2023 at 9:53:38 AM, Norman Gray <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Greetings,
>
> On 5 Jun 2023, at 17:26, Debbie Lapeyre wrote:
>
> And my version of the Grad-student writes a parser story (ain't  time and
> distance wonderful) was that the XML spec had promised
>
>  that a 'reasonably competent graduate student' could write an  XML parser
> in 3 days. And, near the end fo the spec process, a  very bright grad
> student complained bitterly (and in jest) that
>
>  he COULDS NOT write one in 3 days, it had taken nearly 5.
>
>
> My version of the story starts from a context where I wanted to take stuff
> from a parse of an XML document, but throw most of the parse away.  I
> recall I did consider starting on doing this with sed, but after I had
> punched myself in the face for half-an-hour decided that a cut-down scanner
> would be smarter and educational.  Three days later, I realised I'd written
> a large fraction of an XML parser by accident -- and the whitespace rules
> and, yes, unicode, were next on the list -- but that it would be much less
> fun and much more sensible to go with what should have been plan-0 and use
> a library instead.
>
> The lessons being that yes, +1, an XML parser is not a massive challenge
> even for someone without a lot of parser experience, that whitespace is a
> problem, and (the thing I might be adding to this thread) that there isn't
> a cut-down 'this'll do' version of such a parser which is useful.  That's a
> sort of minimalism.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Norman
>
>
> --
> Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>
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