On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 09:19:36AM +0000, Simon Cozens wrote:
> To what extent should the (presumably library-side) ability to parse a
> given markup language influence Perl 6's core language design? (which
> is what this list is nominally about.) I think this ought to
> approximate to "none at all".
Approximately none, except that Perl's self-selected problem domain is
text hacking, and XML is redefining the meaning of "text hacking".
AFAICT, all of this is rather moot. The ability to create a presumably
fast parser using rule{}'s and such solves 80% of the problem. From
there, it's a SMOP to convert text-with-angle-brackets to sensible
native data structures or native processing techniques.
I believe Robin's interest in the area is in ensuring that there will be
a simple way to take a specific XML grammar and [auto]generate an
angle-bracket-friendly parser that produces appropriate domain-specific
data structures without the grovelling through horribly generic data
structure, events or whatnot.
Z.
