[E-Lang] Draft Kernel-E DTD & Sketch of translation to debuggable Java

[Mark S. Miller]

http://www.erights.org/elang/kernel/index.html now has a significantly 
expanded, but still woefully inadequate, explanation of the constructs of 
Kernel-E, and their proposed translations to XML and Java. 
http://www.erights.org/elang/kernel/kernel-e-0.8.9.dtd is the proposed XML 
DTD for representing Kernel-E parse trees.  

http://www.erights.org/javadoc/org/erights/xml/qdom/package-summary.html is 
the javadoc of the beginnings of a minimal set of XML DOM tree classes, 
derived from org.w3c.dom by removing all the crap.  As with normal 
s-expressions, qdom supports only immutable trees that know their children 
but not their parents.  Therefore they can be shared.  However, qdom trees 
should be able to faithfully represent all of XML, just as dom trees do.  I 
will be extending these to support quasi-literals in support of 
http://www.erights.org/elang/grammar/quasi-xml.html (hence the name "qdom"). 
  I expect to initially use qdom trees for just two things:

* For Kernel-E parse trees in support of compilation to Java (along the 
lines explained by http://www.erights.org/elang/kernel/index.html ) and 
eventually C++ (as explained by the ENative pages 
http://www.erights.org/enative/index.html ).

* To debug subsystems that uses Java Object Serialization Streams, such as 
the in-progress revamping of the old "proxy comm" system.  I've looked on 
the web, and I *can't believe* that no one's written a program to parse a 
JOSS stream it order to print an equivalent textual description, and that no 
one's written something to take such a textual description and generate a 
JOSS.  However, I've looked on the web and couldn't find anything.  Given 
today's fads, the natural thing to do is define a DTD for the JOSS format, 
and write converters from JOSS into this XML, and vice versa.  If Javasoft 
had done this a year ago, we would probably not be hearing about XML-RPC or 
SOAP today.

Does anyone have any opinions of MinML http://wilson.co.uk/xml/minml.htm , a 
vastly smaller XML parser than the "standard" stuff (like Apache's Xerces or 
Sun's Project-x)?  Are there other reasonable small open-source parsers or 
dom-tree classes out there?  

Tyler, I recall you were doing some XML stuff, but I could find it among the 
code I downloaded from you?


         Cheers,
         --MarkM