Many XML parsers are available for C. Surely C programmers could find one that 
meet's their needs.

For assembler, it turns out you are far better off writing one. You eliminate 
the need for implementing SCHEMA and greatly improve maintainability. For 
product parms, you can easily specify the field where the data should be placed 
and forget about coding any assembler for those elements. The break even point 
around 15 elements.

I'm not sure what RYO is. There are many C tools for parsing so it's quite 
possible that the RYO syntax was well suited to C. That is not the case for 
XML.  

I agree that C has it's place but where we differ is about the significance of 
the languages. HLASM's ability to easily solve complex situations has 
encouraged the development of advanced technologies and solutions (Cloud, big 
data, SQL, databases, security, data handling techniques, high availability and 
much more). C is responsible Unix and the development of a huge amount of 
software. C has encouraged every programmer to be responsible for every aspect 
of their program and be totally independent of all features in Unix.

Regards, Jon.

On Monday, January 22, 2018 9:00 AM, Gord Tomlin 
<[email protected]> wrote:


On 2018-01-22 10:44, Jon Perryman wrote:

> I also commented that C is a weak language compared to HLASM and gave some 
> examples that force bad coding techniques (e.g. XML parser). A C programmer 
> took offence because he had written an efficient XML parser in C.

Most programmers (whether C or Assembler) would not write their own XML 
parser. They would call a pre-existing parser. FWIW, in the past, I've 
done RYO parsing in both languages, and it was less work for me when I 
did it in C.

I'm not here to defend C. It certainly has its warts. But just as it's 
not good for C programmers to proclaim C to be better than Assembler in 
each and every case, it's not good for Assembler programmers to do the 
reverse. Both languages have their places, and there are also many 
situations where neither one is the best choice.

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