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

 Lauren suggests I’m exaggerating so I’ll re-tell the story, which some
here have already heard. We went to Sydney, Australia in November 1996 to
get married, which we did, and the next day Lauren seriously injured her
right knee, she was barely mobile, so our touristing plans were severely
curtailed.

So we spent quite a bit of time sitting in her Mum’s lounge, watching
cricket on TV while I worked on Lark. I don’t want to create the impression
that it was multiple weeks of heads-down coding, but I’m 100% sure it was
more than a single week’s worth.

The name “Lark” derives from “Lauren’s right knee”.

On Jun 5, 2023 at 10:05:58 AM, Tim Bray <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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