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On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 08:34:53PM +1000, Jan Newmarch wrote:
> Don't confuse the language with the parser. By this criterion even TeX
> doesn't make it as a markup language - I have had many, many files fail to
> parse over a single error.
TeX is a programming language, written by an expert programmer
and almost exclusively used by programmers and tech-savvy people.
Don't get me wrong here, I like TeX, it is very powerful, gives
top quality results and handles equations better than anything else
but at the end of the day, it is very brittle, and it is a programming
language pretending to be a markup language.
> One TeX parser I used even had an "extra help"
> key: when you pressed it, the response was usually "I've given you all the
> help I can, if you can't understand the error then see a human." The onus
> is on you to fix the error, not on the parser - automatic error recovery
> isn't as easy as it seems.
As a particular case in question, TeX is a macro-based programming language
which are the hardest things to debug and as far as I know there is no
macro language that gives even moderately accurate error messages.
In TeX you get errors like, "this token was not the sort of token that
I thought it was going to be" and "something seems to have gone wrong
back there".
Imagine writing C by using #define headers that go 4 or 5 levels deep
and never using any functions. I promise that you won't be able to debug
the result. That's why TeX, powerful though it is, will never move into
general usage other than (maybe) as a back-end processor for some other
typesetting package.
Can you imagine trying to explain to some boofhead warehouse manager
how they should handle an error message from TeX?
> So as a human, I suggest you change the
> offending char and reparse it - and send a flame email to the originator.
I can do that but I don't want to flame the originator too hard or
they might stop sending me any more data. They aren't under contractual
obligation to send me anything so although what they are sending me
is wrong (in the strict sense), I'm glad to be getting it. Sure I pay
for it out of my tax but since when has that given me any rights?
If I change the character this once then that's fixes the problem once,
since it is a news feed I'll just have to face the problem again which
means what I really have to do is write a program to fix the data.
In effect, I'm writing a pre-processor for the XML parser which makes
me think, "how good is XML when I have to write a pre-processor for it".
- Tel ( http://bespoke.homelinux.net/ )
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