[XML-SIG] Re: Pyxie

Sean McGrath sean@digitome.com
Fri, 30 Jun 2000 21:06:01 +0100


[...]
>
>This is the "double parsing" I mentioned. If Pyxie is parsing a one
>gigabyte document (as an extreme example) it needs 1 gigabyte of extra
>disk space for its tempfile.

Nope. Think pipes. Think os.popen(). [1] You have two choices,
use pyexat directly and write the external file. This avoids
the sub-process but costs more disk space. Alternatively,
live with the sub-process call (hardly an issue these days)
and use popen() to create a piped connection to the created
PYX. This is a very disk efficient way of doing things.

[Other conclusions by Paul that are erroneous given
this fundamental misconception about how Pyxie works
elided...]

>
>Why would you generate PYX rather than XML? If we start moving PYX
>between XML-aware programs, it becomes an XML competitor.

There is obviously a fundamental misconncect here. I don't
know what else I can do to explain this to you!

PYX is *line oriented*, I pass it through line oriented tools
using the Unix pipe philsophy. I cannot do that with
XML.

Sorry, but I cannot think how I can make this any
simpler for you.

You seem hell bent on debunking PYX for some
reason. You will not succeed. Not because I am very
clever (I'm not), but because James Clark is very
clever and a legion of SGML developers know the
benefit of a line oriented post-parse notation for
hierarchical data structures thanks to ESIS.

PYX is simply a simplified incarnation of a tried
and trusted structured document processing technique.

Why are you so hostile to it?


[1] The pyxie.py on www.pyxie.org does not use
os.popen because of a problem with stderr
redirection on NT platforms that I am struggling
with. 


Sean,

XML Processing With Python
ISBN: 0 13 021119 2
Prentice Hall