Re: What is a lightweight language

[address@hidden]

Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> writes:

> 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?

Because things that are hard to implement are hard to implement correctly.

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

A 100% compliant one?

> 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.

I don't see what unicode has to do with anything.