[E-Lang] Minimal-XML (was: Draft Kernel-E DTD & Sketch of translation to debuggable Java)

[Mark S. Miller]

At 01:49 PM 9/26/00 , Dan Moniz wrote:
>Some of the more XML-centric people I deal with rely on libxml as the XML swiss
>army parsing chainsaw, but they're working under Linux at the moment, and I
>don't know how portable the code is. There's also the SML (Simplifed Markup
>Language?) project, which is attempting to make a lightweight version of XML;
>perhaps that may have some tools of use (I haven't looked at minml yet, but
>I'll do so now).

libxml is a C library, so it doesn't currently help me.

But on SML, THANK YOU!!  Doing some web searching, SML has turned into 
Minimal-XML, and minimal it is indeed!  The spec is at 
http://www.docuverse.com/smldev/minxmlspec.html .  For my immediate needs -- 
representing Kernel-E & JOSS -- it would be fine.  I simply need to get rid 
of the attributes in my Kernel-E DTD and turn them into text-content 
elements.  For example, in the current proposal, "a + b" translates to

     <callExpr verb="add">
         <nounExpr name="a"/>
         <nounExpr name="b"/>
     </callExpr>

To be compatible with Minimal-XML, it would instead be

     <callExpr>
         <nounExpr>a</nounExpr>
         <verb>add</verb>
         <nounExpr>b</nounExpr>
     </callExpr>

Changing the rest of the proposed Kernel-E DTD should be equally simple.  
Beyond my immediate needs, I intend to use XML as a universal parse tree 
representation -- a poor-man's s-expression if you will -- in order to use 
quasi-literals to process data that can be so parsed 
http://www.erights.org/elang/grammar/quasi-xml.html .  Minimal-XML seems 
perfectly adequate to this task.

The only remaining issue is what to do about XML data that isn't in 
Minimal-XML?  Here's a strange idea.  If we're going to deal with data in 
weird format Foo by parsing it into Minimal-XML, then we should do this as 
well when weird format Foo is XML itself!  Each parse-node from parsing XML 
would be represented as a Minimal-XML element.  This will be explosively 
more verbose than the original XML, which, if XML's history is any guide, 
should only make it more popular ;)


         Cheers,
         --MarkM