At 4:47 PM +0100 3/26/03, Robin Berjon wrote:Fast and efficient graphs of all sorts would be very useful. A way to define a complex graph of interlinked arbitrary objects while being reasonable on memory and good with GC would be a definitive big win, especially if it can be lazy. Especially with nice ways to write visitors and easy searches in the graph based on object properties (but I could be asking for too much ;).
Probably a bit much, yep. :) I'd be happy with simple graph representation, annotation, and traversal. And for my purposes a DAG is sufficient. Loops are terribly annoying to have to deal with.
Efficient annotation and traversal would go a long way, but almost all useful XML representations have loops unfortunately.
DAGs wouldn't enough though, most XML tree representations aren't really trees, they're very cyclic. Some automata can treat a stream of events as a B-Tree being visited, but those are rather rare currently.
I was under the impression XML was very much a tree, and didn't do loops. Am I missing something here? (I don't, in general, do XML)
Your impression isn't wrong, it's just that in actual use one needs more information. If you lose the cycles then you could as well just be working on stream of parse events (which is typical in SAX), in which case an in-memory representation is probably not useful. And that's just for basic stuff, if you want to usefully represent ID/IDREFs, QName linking, internal XLinks, etc you're basically pointing from random nodes to other random nodes.
Given what you describe plus loops we could take over and do Really Cool Stuff :)
-- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
