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Re: What is a lightweight language



jmarshall@mak.com wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> writes:
> 
> > In my experience it takes roughly one line in C, Perl, Python or almost
> > any language.  Typically the line instantiates a parser object and hands
> > it a filename.  Not unlike READ.
> 
> It may take one line to *invoke* the reader, but to implement it?  On
> my windows2000 machine msxml3.dll is a megabyte of code.  On the
> other hand, CormanLispServer.dll is 300 K.

Why would an end-user care how much effort it takes to implement an XML
parser?

Today, operating systems and programming language distributions ship
with an XML parser already installed.

Anyhow, MSXML implements far more than an XML parser. It is a COM object
exposing SAX, DOM, XPath and XSLT. Still, there is no doubt that
S-expressions parsers will always be smaller if only because
S-expressions don't have to deal with any Unicode issues.

 Paul Prescod