[XML-SIG] Future plans

[Greg Stein]

On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, Paul Prescod wrote:
> Dieter Maurer wrote:
>...
> > As for the explicite memory management necessary for 4DOM:
> >   It is very easy to introduce cycles in Python's data structures.
> >   I would expect that many non-trivial Python programs
> >   contain such cycles and leak memory -- without dramatic
> >   effect. I can live with explicite memory management for DOM trees,
> >   even though they tend to be rather large structures.
> 
> I would like to suggest again the idea that for simple uses we could use
> a proxy and that sophisticated users could "ask for" a fast version and
> get back an unproxied version that they must release.
> 
> My concern is for newbies. They are thinking "XML documents" not
> "cycles." The default should be safe but a little slow.

I solve the problem in qp_xml by avoiding it altogether :-)  The output
elements of qp_xml does not contain a parent reference. I've found that
the application always knows the parent anyhow since it had to traverse
down thru the parent in the first place. And if you're passing around
subtrees of an XML document, then they are treated context-free (i.e. it
doesn't matter what the parent is).

Just my 3 cents (inflation in the new millenia :-)

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/