Jon S. Berndt writes: > There are othe rreasons why I'd like to keep our own parser. For > one thing, I am very AR about knowing how each piece of code > works. I want (and need) to be comfortable with the code that goes > into JSBSim. XML is *very* broad, but the portion of it we need to > use is extremely limited. I am very hesitant to bloat JSBSim, to > add external requirements, etc.
I'd embed the parser right in JSBSim rather than requiring an external library. The C source files for Expat are under 300K, so they wouldn't make much of a difference in the distro size. It's wise to avoid rolling your own, lightly-tested, potentially-buggy when there's free, stable, well-tested and well-documented code out there. None of us is writing our own printf or TCP/IP stack these days, no matter how AR we are -- I suggest that an XML parser is the same nature of beast. > One of the key aims of JSBSim since the start has been to allow its > use by college students of aerospace engineering. I'd prefer to > continue to use a minimal set of XML only to the extent we need it > to read in config files. I'm not suggesting that you start using data-content notations, external entities, etc., any more than FlightGear is forced to use the more esoteric parts of OpenGL. The format can be as simple as you like, though I think that Tony's right that it's time to make the tagging more granular. Look at it this way -- college students can walk into Borders and buy dozens of books about XML at all level of difficulties. They've probably learned XML in their computer courses, they read about it in computer magazines, they can visit hundreds of XML-oriented Web sites, and there are XML-aware people on campus who can help them with it. None of that is true of the custom JSBSim XML-like format, so you're actually putting them at a disadvantage by not using XML (just as you would be by using SI units when most of the textbooks use Imperial). All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
