Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: [RFC] handle paths in a saner way

[Mike Anderson]

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
>> The thing is, XML is not that easy to parse, and, in fact, packages.xml
>> is not parsed properly - the parsing is done line by line, and can't
>> handle comments. What's really spurring this mini-rant is that I've been
>> looking for a decent XML editor recently, and there aren't any. That
>> tells you something.
> 
> I can only agree, but this is a somewhat separate issue.
> 
> For 2.4 I may add a smallish and more compliant XML/SAX parser.  Do you
> have any alternatives?

I have this one:
http://www.friendofthepigeon.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/naivexml.tgz
(XMLParser.st & Handler.st)

It's deliberately simple, does a few things wrong (mostly deliberately),
and has some bits missing, like support for CDATA sections (I disapprove
of CDATA sections), but it works well. I wrote it as an alternative for
the full XML package, which is hard going and can't cope if there's no
prolog (horrors!).

I'd quite like to see the packages file written as a (large) array
constant, actually, but to make it attractive, the parser needs to allow
symbols without the # prefix (as opposed to just true, false and nil).
That's quite high up my wish-list for general programming, actually.

Regards,

Mike